UP Gang Rape: Two Constables Sacked, Accused Arrested

UP Gang Rape: Two Constables Sacked, Accused Arrested

As outrage spread over the horrific gangrape of two Dalit sisters in the district, authorities today sacked two constables in connection with the crime even as police arrested another accused in the case.

The action came three days after the girls were gangraped and their bodies were found hanging from a tree. SP Atul Kumar Saxena said the services of two constables Chhatrapal Yadav and Sarvesh Yadav have been terminated.

"One more accused Awadhesh Yadav has been arrested by the police," he said.

Of the seven wanted in the case, three (policeman Sarvesh Yadav and brothers Pappu and Awadhesh Yadav) have been arrested so far, he said. Sarvesh and Pappu were arrested yesterday.

Four others Urvesh Yadav (brother of Pappu and Awadhesh), policeman Chhatrapal Yadav and two unidentified persons are at large.

The two girls, who were cousins and aged 14 and 15, went missing from their house on the night of May 27 and their bodies were found hanging from a mango tree in the village in Ushait area the next morning.

The incident had triggered protests in the area with villagers alleging police apathy, following which an FIR was registered against seven persons. The postmortem report of the two girls confirmed that they were raped before murder, Saxena had said.

Sarvesh and Chhatrpal have been booked under section 120B (criminal conspiracy) of IPC, while the three brothers --Pappu, Awadhesh and Urvesh-- and two others have been booked under Section 302 (murder) and 376 (rape) of IPC.

From Global To Local In India By Alex Jensen

From Global To Local In India By Alex Jensen



 From Global To Local In India

By Alex Jensen

28 May, 2014

The Economics of Happiness blog  

“The Future
is Fast. We are Faster.” This ubiquitous billboard for a tech company
neatly captures the zeitgeist in modern-day Bangalore, and
rapidly-urbanizing India generally. Today, Bangalore's erstwhile
appellation as India‘s ‘garden city' seems sadly anachronistic. To
arrive at the Visthar Academy of Justice and Peace Studies on the
outskirts of Bangalore – where we would be lodging for the next three
days for the 3 rd Economics of Happiness Conference [http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/conference-2014-india]
– requires a painstakingly slow creep through bumper-to-bumper traffic,
past glamorous shopping malls and an exploding, bewildering skein of
real estate developments, garbage mountains, and slums. The air quality
is truly mephitic from the collective emissions of millions of vehicles,
factories, and garbage fires. Such are some of the characteristics of
the modern Indian megacity, a rude foil to the Panglossian image of
progress presented by the official boosters of globalization,
urbanization and growth.

Conventional development – i.e.
western-style industrialization, urbanization, and consumerism – is
being foisted on India more intensively than ever by both Indian and
foreign governments and corporations. The advertised purpose of this is
to meet aggressive annual economic growth goals, dangling a shining GDP
in front of foreign investors who will come and spur the process forward
in a self-perpetuating cycle. Deeper still is the national political
obsession with the elusive quest to reach the promised land of
‘developed.'

Development, as these forces implicitly
conceive it, entails transforming India into a facsimile of modern
America – the ecological, cultural, psychological and other shortcomings
of that society notwithstanding. But, as author Aseem Shrivastava
remarked during the Economics of Happiness Conference, “What is
development really about? It is about the conversion of life into
money.” The methods used to do so in India are commonly brutal, with
various state governments using violent methods to wrest land from
villagers in order to set up regulation-free corporate enclaves known
as  special economic zones [http://www.countercurrents.org/ind-bhaduri070107.htm].

As globalized development proceeds in
India, giant corporations like Reliance Industries, Tata, and
Bharti/Walmart are busy consolidating virtually every sector of the
economy, with the helping hand of the central and state governments (see
below). North American style supermarkets are spreading, and toxic
plastics and used cell phones are being discarded into the environment
as fast as the factories can pump them out. The impact on small farmers –
many of whom have been swept into the dragnet of ‘contract farming' –
has been particularly deadly. Through deceitful advertising and the
encouragement of development agencies, toxic chemicals and genetically
manipulated seeds have invaded Indian agriculture, enabling companies
like Monsanto-Mahyco to push thousands of farmers into debt and leading
to an epidemic of farmer suicides [http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/02/12/the-largest-wave-of-suicides-in-history].
Responding to the common claim, “if corporate seeds and chemicals were
so bad, why would farmers choose them?”, Kavitha Kuruganti of the ASHA (Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture) Network [http://www.lokashakti.org/pages/viewgroup/1101-Alliance+for+Sustainable+Holistic+Agriculture]
told us in an interview at the conference how the agribusiness
companies use dancing girls, Bollywood stars and many other highly
manipulative techniques to push their products on farmers, while
information on the hazards and risks is nowhere to be seen.

Far from representing the outcome of the
mythically rational or natural workings of the market, this form of
hyper corporate globalization – in India and everywhere else – is
directly underwritten by subsidies, tax breaks, land-seizures and
various other state giveaways and props, a.k.a. corporate welfare. Under
chief minister Narendra Modi (and the new Prime Minister of India) the
state of Gujarat has led the charge in aggressively dispersing this
welfare to India's richest one percent [http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?289709].
As author Pankaj Mishra has written on the occasion of Modi's recent
electoral victory: “His record as chief minister is predominantly
distinguished by the transfer – through privatization or outright
gifts – of national resources to the country's biggest corporations. His
closest allies – India's biggest businessmen – have accordingly
enlisted their mainstream media outlets into the cult of Modi as
decisive administrator; dissenting journalists have been removed or
silenced.” [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/16/what-next-india-pankaj-mishra].

Not to be outdone, the opposing Congress
Party under the leadership of Manmohan Singh (the Harvard-educated
economist who, as finance minister back in 1991 authored the
liberalization policies that flung India open to the needs of global
capital) has also been doing its utmost to increase the shareholder
value of big corporations. To take one of many examples, this government
has appointed the petroleum minister as environment minister (he holds
both titles still, without any apparent sense of irony), who promised
that “project-clearance files would leave his desk by 5 pm the very day
they were presented to him; there was no promise of upholding
environmental standards and safety.” As reported in a recent editorial
in Economic and Political Weekly , “This move indicates that
the Manmohan Singh government is desperate to send out the “right”
signals to the private sector and big capital.” [http://www.epw.in/editorials/crass-decision.html]
Among many other corporate-friendly priorities, this new environment
minister began pushing immediately for allowing unrestricted GMO field
trials and crop cultivation.

These sops to industry by the Indian
state are in lockstep with the imperious lecturing of Western powers, in
particular the U.S. government (and international institutions
controlled by it like the World Bank and IMF), whose muscle is flexed in
India on behalf of what it terms promoting a sound investment climate,
euphemism for policy reforms needed to benefit conditions of
profitability for American corporations (e.g., agrichemical
corporations). The recently retired Ambassador Nancy Powell fulminated
earlier this year, with characteristic American state hubris, “For India
to return to faster growth, new policies and economic reforms need to
be put in place by the government in areas such as opening multi-brand
retail up to foreign direct investment.” What this amounts to is
personal stumping for Wal-Mart by the highest representative of the U.S.
government in India. U.S. officialdom in India issues variations of
this royal decree ad nauseum . Even US President Barack Obama
has taken up the cause of his country's needy retail giant, complaining
last July that “India has prohibited FDI in too many sectors such as
retail” [http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/allow-fdi-in-multi-brand-retail-us-to-india/article1-901536.aspx].

Meanwhile, the organs of the media and
modern schooling continue their insidious assault on India's diverse
cultures, seducing and coercing ever more people away from their
land-based traditions and local economies into the global consumer
monoculture. A country with an ancient heritage of innumerable
sustainable, zero-waste local economies is now increasingly awash in
petrochemical pollution and gargantuan landfills, swelling megacities
and glittering shopping malls for the super-affluent. Also on the rise
are many of the less visible but equally devastating side effects of
this kind of development: depression, diet-related diseases (e.g.
obesity and diabetes), loss of languages, monoarchitecture (cement,
rebar, and tin), monoclothing (mass-produced sweatshop synthetics), and
worst, a deep internalization of notions of backwardness and a need to
catch-up to or ‘develop' like the United States and Europe.

Despite the pace of ‘development' in
India, it is also true that much more of the vernacular, the
traditional, and the independent hangs on here than in many countries.
Even in the middle of major cities, large quantities of food and other
daily needs are still supplied from tiny independent local shops or
street vendors, and local craftsmen (weavers, potters, tinkers, tailors,
etc.) ply their trades in the enormous ‘informal' sector. Multinational
chain restaurants like KFC and McDonald's – while now ubiquitous in the
affluent parts of cities – have not displaced stubbornly popular local
eateries, and local alternatives to corporate junk food persist
everywhere. And in spite of economic, trade and development policies
that relentlessly conspire against them, small farmers still make up the
majority of the population, and most of the food is still provided by
them [http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva300407.htm].

Because it still retains so much of the
traditional and land-based, India is arguably better-positioned than the
West to forge an alternative path to the future – one based on
principles of economic localization. Despite the grievous losses to seed
and food diversity occasioned by decades of imposition of industrial
agriculture, an enormous amount remains intact, as illustrated at a
recent seed festival [http://vikalpsangam.org/article/the-delhi-seed-festival-march-8-9-2014/#.U1HhC6LQ6zY] and an amazing Adivasi (indigenous) food festival
[http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.in/2014/03/the-forgotten-foods.html].
There is a vibrant sustainable food and farming movement to protect and
promote this diversity [see http://www.kisanswaraj.in/ ], and GMO trials can still be stopped here [see http://indiagminfo.org/ ]
(Monsanto's Bt cotton is the only commercially grown GMO, though the
aforementioned petroleum/environment minister is working overtime to
change that). Though the political establishment is dutifully working to
roll out the red carpet for the big boxes, corporate retail has yet to
fully penetrate, and faces formidable resistance from small shopkeepers
[see http://indiafdiwatch.org/ ]. Farmers and tribal groups are courageously agitating against industrial land take-overs in dozens of states [http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main42.asp?filename=cr180709the_peasant.asp].

Most critically, countless groups and
individuals are arising to confront the development monster – to
actively challenge its assumptions and impositions, and to regenerate
dying traditions and nontoxic local economies that rely on local
resources. And there is vibrant resistance and renewal work happening
all over the subcontinent that comprises, in essence, a massive
localization movement.

The Economics of Happiness Conference [http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/conference-2014-india]
provided a platform from which to launch an exciting new part of that
movement, an India-wide initiative called Alternatives India ( Vikalp Sangam in Hindi) [http://www.vikalpsangam.org/].
The initiative asks this basic question: “As the world hurtles towards
greater ecological devastation, inequalities, and social conflicts … are
there alternative ways of meeting human needs and aspirations, without
trashing the earth and without leaving half of humanity behind?” Their
answer is a resounding yes, and they point to “a multitude of grassroots
and policy initiatives: from meeting basic needs in ecologically
sensitive ways to decentralized governance and producer-consumer
movements, from rethinking urban and rural spaces towards sustainability
to struggles for social and economic equity.” Alternatives India is a
platform to highlight, connect, and thereby strengthen the country's
diverse profusion of local initiatives that are charting a saner course
into the future for India. Perhaps the future of India is not fast and
faster after all, but slow and local.

Alex Jensen is Project Coordinator at Local Futures – International Society for Ecology and Culture [http://www.localfutures.org/].Alex
has worked in the US and India, where he coordinated The Ladakh Project
from 2004 to 2009. He has collaborated on the content of Local Futures'
Roots of Change curriculum and the Economics of Happiness discussion
guide. He has worked with cultural affirmation and agro-biodiversity
projects in campesino communities in a number of countries and is active
in environmental health/anti-toxics work.

The Impossibility Of Growth Demands A New Economic System By George Monbiot

The Impossibility Of Growth Demands A New Economic System By George Monbio

The Impossibility Of Growth Demands A New Economic System

By George Monbiot

28 May, 2014

Monbiot.com

Let us
imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt
filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by
4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium
in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker
Jeremy Grantham(1).

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size
of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The
volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar
systems(2). It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach
the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To
fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore
if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of
water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously
to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity
impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use
of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every
upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in
agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by
industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior
industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained(3).
But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the
phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism
that made possible the progress and the pathologies (total war, the
unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of
the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend,
the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are
mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible reserves have been exhausted,
we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our
impossible proposition.

On Friday, a few days after scientists
announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now
inevitable(4), the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would
go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park(5). It had made an
offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in
that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You
could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador
is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government argued, should
it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is
drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and
received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a
colourful record of destruction and spills(6), will now enter one of the
most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest
is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of
North America(7).

The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to
penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic
Republic of Congo(8); one of the last strongholds of the mountain
gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain,
where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been
identified in the south-east(9), the government fantasises about turning
the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the
trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish
bribes to local people(10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do
not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows
that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of
the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something
concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its
resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and
differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible
equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes
become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in
aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening.
Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years(12). The trade body
Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record
high level and it will continue to grow.”(13) If, in the digital age, we
won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for
other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who
set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller?
Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish,
rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the
growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By
unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to
extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s
unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell
us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have
resurfaced(14).

As the philosopher Michael Rowan points
out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s
predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we
were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we
delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing
while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society
built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are
the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned
almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects
guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if
trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the
three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations
and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the
outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable
distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is
regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of
mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our
inability even to discuss it.

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Visit his website at www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853

2. Grantham expressed this volume as 1057
cubic metres. In his paper We Need To Talk About Growth, Michael Rowan
translated this as 2.5 billion billion solar systems. (http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/).
This source gives the volume of the solar system (if it is treated as a
sphere) at 39,629,013,196,241.7 cubic kilometres, which is roughly 40 x
1021 cubic metres. Multiplied by 2.5 billion billion, this gives 1041
cubic metres. So, unless I’ve got the wrong figure for the volume of the
solar system or screwed my units up, which is eminently possible,
Michael Rowan’s translation looks like an underestimate. I’ll stick with
his figure though, as I don’t have much confidence in my own. Any
improvements, comments or corrections via the contact form gratefully
received.

3. EA Wrigley, 2010. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press.

4. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/12/western-antarctic-ice...

5. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/ecuador-amazon-yasuni...

6. http://www.entornointeligente.com/articulo/2559574/ECUADOR-Gobierno-conc...

7. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/16/ecuador-approves-yasuni-ama...

8. http://www.wwf.org.uk/how_you_can_help/virunga/

9. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-report-billi...

10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10598473/Fracking-could...

11. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-report-billi...

12. Philippe Sibaud, 2012. Opening
Pandora’s Box: The New Wave of Land Grabbing by the Extractive
Industries and the Devastating Impact on Earth. The Gaia Foundation. http://www.gaiafoundation.org/opening-pandoras-box

13. http://www.forestindustries.fi/industry/paper_cardboard_converted/paper_...

14. https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/articles/space-race-over

15. Michael Rowan, 2014. We Need To Talk About Growth (And we need to do the sums as well.) http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/

GPS Is Not Foolproof. A Map Still Makes the Most of Summer Travel

Posted: 19 May 2014 05:48 AM PDT

(NewsUSA) – It’s the season of sunshine and road trips — and if you want to get the most out of your four-wheeled adventure, you better pack a map to go along with that electronic GPS.
“The best reason to keep paper maps in your vehicle, especially on long road trips, is because GPS isn’t always reliable,” says Cynthia Ochterbeck, editorial director of Michelin Travel Partner.
Confirming this trend, a 2013 Harris Interactive survey of 2,200 U.S. drivers who use GPS found that 63 percent say that the technology has led them astray at least once by pointing them in the wrong direction or creating complex, confusing and incorrect routes.
So, while it may seem that paper maps have gone the way of Atari’s Pong, they are still just as important as ever — not to mention many other benefits that you don’t get with some GPS devices.
“One of the greatest characteristics of paper maps is that you get all of the details, [such as] points of interest,” says Ochterbeck. “Plus, you don’t risk getting lost when you lose the signal or the battery dies on your cell phone or GPS device.”
Another benefit is that, in addition to printed maps providing efficient ways of understanding road networks that surround particular areas, the information is very reliable. Plus, new specialized maps, like Michelin’s Zoom Maps, are aiming to enhance the paper map experience.
Most people recognize Michelin for its tires, but, unknown to many, it also has a 112-year history of creating maps and travel guides. In fact, it provided the maps that were used by the Allies for the D-Day invasion. Improving on this history, the new Zoom Maps offer seven regional maps for travel in the U.S., with the ability to zoom in on more detail in urban areas. In addition, the new maps have a “not-to-be-missed” event calendar for regions, in an easy-to-fold system so you don’t have to unfold the entire map.
“Technology is great, but a printed map is one of the most important tools a traveler in an unfamiliar setting can have — the battery doesn’t die, it is easy to use, and it allows you to make decisions on route changes if necessary,” says Ochterbeck. “Even better, there are no roaming or data charges to worry about.”
For more information, visit www.michelintravel.com.