(1) A Successful Protest Against a Chhattisgarh Mine Highlights the Failure of India’s Coal Auctions
https://thewire.in/175055/chhattisgarh-mine-protest-coal-auctions/
While both Jindal and Coal India abdicated responsibility around the Gare Pelma coal mines, local Adivasis have tried their hardest to make sure they don’t get away with it.
(2) Fighting for Peace Amidst Manufactured Hate, ‘Karwan-E-Mohabbat’ Reaches the Capital
https://thewire.in/176326/karwan-e-mohabbat-reaches-delhi/
The Karwan today reached Delhi to meet thousands of people, including widows of the 1984 Sikh massacre, before proceeding to Gandhi’s samadhi.
(3) Questioning the consumption based developmental paradigm
Krishnamurti Foundation of India, Bangalore http://valleyschool.herokuapp.com/
Source: Vikalp Sangam Website
(4) Biodiversity plans go to the grassroots
Plan board advocates key role for local bodies
Local bodies in Kerala will soon have a key role in
biodiversity management, with the State Planning Board
adopting a participatory, bottom-up approach to
conservation and sustainable development.
A report of the working group on biodiversity set up
by the board has recommended a comprehensive
biodiversity strategy and action plan with funding for
the 13th Five Year Plan.
A committee co-chaired by Oommen V.Oommen, former
Chairman, Kerala State Biodiversity Board, and Priya
Davidar, Head, Department of Ecology and Environmental
Sciences, Pondicherry University, envisages a critical
role for the panchayat-level Biodiversity Management
Committee (BMC).
BMCs in 100 local bodies
The report seeks to develop model BMCs in 100 local
bodies every year during the 13th Plan period. It
proposes a standing committee and a working group on
biodiversity in all panchayats, along with
environmental/ biodiversity grama sabhas empowered to
clear quarrying, sand-mining, and wetland conversion
at the local level.
Preparation of training modules on biodiversity
management and skill development programmes for
resource persons and stakeholders are among the steps
recommended for capacity development of the BMCs.
The report also recommends Access and Benefit Sharing
(ABS) as an option for the BMCs to generate revenue.
Vice Chairman of the State Planning Board
V.K.Ramachandran said the proposals of the working
group would be integrated into the Annual Plan of
local bodies.
The report advocates a participatory management
system for protection of fragile ecosystems such as
hills and mountains, shola forests, laterite hills,
mangroves, sacred groves and riparian habitats, and
eco restoration of degraded areas like abandoned
quarries and ponds.
Mobile apps and crowd sourcing have been recommended
for ecosystem mapping. Local bodies have also been
tasked with management of invasive species.
“Joint BMCs can function as a very important
component of local level participation in biodiversity
use and conservation,” says the report.
It stresses the need to complete the inventory of the
plant and animal biodiversity and the assessment,
monitoring and conservation of threatened species and
indigenous breeds in Kerala over the next five years.
The preparation of city biodiversity index for
Thirurvananthapuram, Kochi, and Kozhikode,
afforestation of public land in urban areas, eco
restoration of waterbodies and establishment of
biodiversity parks are among the major recommendations
of the panel.
(5) What exactly is a smart city? The Indian government does not want you to know
lINK: https://scroll.in/article/848933/what-exactly-is-a-smart-city-the-indian-government-does-not-want-you-to-know
It thwarted the Bureau of Indian Standards’ plan to fix clear criteria for defining a smart city, and came out with a fuzzy ‘Liveability Index’ instead.
Are the urban centres selected by the Union government to be upgraded into “smart cities” actually becoming smarter? How does the government define a smart city under its much-publicised Smart City Mission? This may never be known. An exercise to set clear benchmarks to assess when exactly a city is delivering a high enough quality of life to its inhabitants to be declared a smart city was shut down by the urban development ministry late last year.
The initiative had been
started by the Bureau of Indian Standards in 2015. Though its work was
in the final stage, bureau was asked to halt its work to set up
benchmark standards for smart cities. Instead, the urban development
ministry has now devised a “Liveability Index”, which will enable a city
to carry the “smart city” label merely because it has been selected by
the government for the mission. The index will assess the cities only on
relative improvements over time in delivering services to residents and
not in absolute terms. The index will merely rank the cities already
earmarked as “smart” by the government.
To piece together how and why the government aborted the attempt to define smart cities, Scroll.in
reviewed the draft standards the Bureau of Indian Standards had
prepared and other documents from the bureau and the urban development
ministry.The ministry did not respond to detailed queries sent by Scroll.in.
Smart City Mission
Establishing
smart cities was one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first flagship
initiatives after coming to power. Launched in 2015, the Smart City
Mission aims to develop 109 cities that will “provide core
infrastructure, a decent quality of life to its citizens, clean and
sustainable environment and application of Smart Solutions”.
Initially,
only broad principles were set out about the mission and the idea of
smart cities. No definition or hard criteria were laid down.
Cities
bid to be selected for the plan. Municipalities were encouraged to hire
consultants to prepare their bids. Candidates were expected to submit a
plan listing the array of activities and ideas they would implement.
After several rounds of screening, 90 cities were chosen. These cities
then appointed empanelled consultants to carry out a portfolio of
projects that would turn them smart cities.
Under the scheme, the
Union government will pay the selected cities Rs 100 crore every year
for five years. The state government in which the city is located will
match that amount. Cities are expected to generate the rest of the funds
from the market through bonds or public-private partnerships. Their
municipalities are required to set up private companies known as
“special purpose vehicles” to manage the project.
Setting the standards
After
the government announced the Smart City Mission, the Bureau of Indian
Standards, an independent body under the department of consumer affairs,
decided to create standards to define what services and infrastructure a
city should provide to be called a smart city in the Indian context.
The bureau, which is in charge of defining national standards for goods
and processes, noted that the idea of smart cities varied from country
to country. In 2015, it formed a committee under former urban
development secretary Sudhir Krishna to establish national standards for
smart cities.
The committee comprised nine multidisciplinary
working groups, which, after a year of deliberations until September
2016, came up with 46 core and 47 supportive indicators to assess city
services and quality of life across sectors.
These included
indicators on economics, education, energy, environment, health,
governance, transport, shelter and safety. Other indicators related to
particulate matter pollution, renewable energy consumption, the
unemployment rate, the ratio of police personnel to population, and the
infant mortality rate. The draft prescribed methodologies to measure
data on each of the indicators. “Sustainability as a general principle”
was at the heart of the standards, the committee said.
The standards were expected to raise the bar for Indian cities to be described as “smart” since many of these measurable indicators were not part of the existing assessment process.
Ministry not interested
But
the idea of having strict criteria for smart cities did not find takers
at the urban development ministry, which oversees the Smart City
Mission.
In fact, it should have been evident from the beginning
that the government was not keen on defining clear, sharp
qualifications. In its initial guidelines for the Smart City Mission,
the ministry had stated,
“There is no universally accepted definition of a smart city. It means
different things to different people…Even in India, there is no one way
of defining a smart city.”
Records shows the ministry was wary of
the bureau’s proposed standards from the outset. “Are we ready to fix
standards for smart cities even before a single one has [been] set up?”
the urban development secretary wrote in an internal file noting on the
bureau’s request to the ministry to participate in consultations on the
standards in July 2015.
Justifying the absence of strict standards, another official in the urban development ministry wrote in March 2016: It seems the ministry wanted to put the cart before the horse. It wanted to see what projects and ideas urban bodies would propose in their bids and then tailor-make the standards to suit those projects.“The smart city mission is one-of-its-kind and does not start with a definition of a Smart City or sets a-priori Standards for Smart Cities to achieve. In fact, the Mission document only sets some definitional boundaries within which the competing cities have to develop their Smart City proposals. The Smart City Components, Indicators, Data sources etc. will have to be culled out from the smart City proposals of at least 50 Smart cities. As such the ministry is of the view that preparation of any standards…in BIS is premature.”
“This is illogical,” said a senior official involved in the drafting of the standards at the bureau. “You set the standards for the output first and then design the products and the processes to ensure a certain quality of output. You don’t design the product first and then decide the standards based on what you have.”
The ministry refused to endorse
the standards or participate in the bureau’s meetings. Instead, it
wrote to the consumer affairs ministry, under which the bureau operates,
asking it to “defer” the formulation of standards. Despite this, the
bureau went ahead and published the draft standards for public comments
in September 2016.
The urban development ministry reflected on these developments in November 2016 file noting:
“Only a broad framework is given to cities in which they have to conceptualise their idea of of a Smart City and plan their pathway to ‘Smartness’. The broad framework can be called a ‘light touch, loose fit’ approach and is different from the cookie-cutter model followed largely in other programmes. As part of the light touch approach, only a guiding framework is given to the cities to prepare their ‘Smart City Proposal’ for competition. As a result following the approach, all standards for Indian Smart Cities will have to be called out from the Smart City Proposals of Smart Cities.”
The ministry
raised the stakes. The same file noting shows that its senior officials
decided to take up “the matter strongly with PMO [Prime Minister’s
Office]…to keep in abeyance the process of specifications of standards
of Smart Cities”. The officials said:
“The BIS [Bureau of Indian Standards] is following a conventional process largely relying on only one set of Smart City standards developed overseas leading to a very narrow way of looking at a Smart City. The diversity and plurality found in Indian cities will be completely missed out.”
The bureau, however, said its standards were
derived from International Organisation for Standardisation benchmarks
on “Sustainable Development of Communities: Indicators for City Services
and Quality of Life” and were “modulated” by the standards notified by
various Indian agencies. The International Organisation for
Standardisation is an independent, non-governmental international
organisation with 163 national standards bodies as members. The bureau’s
draft also prescribed that while adopting its standards, aspirations of
the cities – “for instance, if the city chooses to remain a heritage
city, a tourism city, a business city, or an industrial city” – should
be retained and nurtured.
The ministry won the argument. The bureau was asked to prematurely shut down its exercise. The draft standards, which had been opened to public comments, were pulled off from the agency’s website and the expert committee wound up.
Promoting chosen projects
In
reaction to what may be seen as a turf battle between the ministry and
the bureau, the ministry decided it would draft its own standards. In
November 2016, it released the draft for public comments, and asked the
states to give their views on it. The standards were released in June
2017. Only, there were no actual standards to define a smart city.
Instead, the ministry had devised the complex Liveability Index to rate
and rank cities. The introduction to the index read:
“The
Ministry of Urban Development has developed a set of ‘Liveability
Standards in Cities’ to generate a Liveability Index and rate cities.
The source of the Liveability Standards are the 24 features contained in
the Smart City Proposals, which have been grouped into 15 categories.
These categories are part of the four pillars of comprehensive
development of cities.”
The index is designed to
simultaneously promote projects, events and technologies the government
has already approved under various Smart City Plans and not just measure
outcomes of these projects, technologies and efforts.
The
bureau’s standards, by contrast, relied purely on assessing the end
result of the mission, and its various projects and components. These
standards were agnostic to how the targets were achieved, what
technologies were used or projects implemented.
For example, when
the bureau intended to measure if the city had become safer, it asked
for data on the number of police personnel, number of homicides, rate of
crime against women, response time of the police to crime scenes, and
rate of violent crimes.
In contrast, the urban development
ministry’s index asks whether the city has put up surveillance cameras
all over. Most cities have already committed to installing surveillance
cameras. There is little research in India to suggest installing cameras
makes a city safer. Yet, the index will only encourage cities to put
cameras to rank better.
There are other ways in which the
ministry’s index will provide a more rosy picture than the metrics the
bureau wanted to use. For example, when assessing air pollution, the
ministry does not even ask for data on the most harmful pollutant –
particulate matter. On water quality, it only wants to know the
percentage of samples that tested safe; the actual quality of water is
not considered.
Read without the fine print, the Liveability Index
would only provide a plain rating of cities, say on a scale of one to
100, and nothing more. Users would have to pore over records, which may
not be available publicly, to know what the index really measured and
how. In contrast, the bureau had suggested an open data platform, where
information on all the parameters is released for the public to freely
review, assess and comment.
“The
Ministry of Urban Development has developed a set of ‘Liveability
Standards in Cities’ to generate a Liveability Index and rate cities.
The source of the Liveability Standards are the 24 features contained in
the Smart City Proposals, which have been grouped into 15 categories.
These categories are part of the four pillars of comprehensive
development of cities.”
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Invitation
Wild Vegetables festivals
Pune District, Maharashtra State
On Behalf of Local women and
villagers of Bhorgiri, Kharpud and Bhomale (varche) villages
in and around the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary, we are
cordially inviting you for the "Wild/ Uncultivated vegetable
festivals" at Bhjorgiri, Kharpud and Bhomale (Varche) on 10th,
17th and 24th September 2017
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