Idling under the Neem Tree

 Backyard Birding in Basavanagudi  By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse Bless my luck, sighted a baby crow pheasant in the wooded area of my house in Basavanagudi today over my morning cuppa coffee. Basavanagudi is a suburb in Bangalore that is considered charming, well planned, conservative with old world charm oozing out of every nook and cranny. Tile roofed villas and Bungalows with open courtyards, lofty fruit trees in huge plots of land, well laid out roads and pavements, storm water drains in place, pavements on tree lined avenues, green gardens, where the telephone cables are never dysfunctional, water supply and sewerage infrastructure never overlap nor cross paths. Power supply infrastructure remains solid and perfect; only the power supply company officials have become so corrupt that pilferage is the norm not the exception. I live in a green villa in Basavanagudi and learnt birding in my backyard staring at the trees. But today was a great blessing. I actu...

  Without planning resource management, we end up bursting at the seams By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse All water bodies are being filled up to create more land for human habitation This most certainly not smart city governance. It is neither smart nor is there anything to do with governance. Unmitigated unchecked horizontal expansion of vertical growth is not inclusive horizontal economic growth. Think about it, vertical economic growth is always at the expense of planned exits planned infrastructure. If only there had been planned economic growth across resource rich India, there would have been no migration at all. Today migrant laborers squat on the periphery of prosperous cities like Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, and Thiruvananthapuram. They come to these cities seeking part time employment. They make good by taking up part time employment under various heads … in various time slots and actually prosper to the point of being able to afford const...

  What has civilisation come to? By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse The botched / failed execution of Christa Paike, a death row convict in Tennessee in the United States of America is that of the first person in recorded history of Humankind who survived three attempts at execution and has lived to tell the tale. Albeit a ghastly one: - that the legal community doesn’t care two hoots to listen to. The botched execution should mark a watershed and set aside death penalty and execution from the annals of humanity’s history. For any person to survive coma is bad enough,… to survive two attempts at execution in one day and then lapsing into coma, and worse waking up from coma…in this case the survivor of three attempted executions is a mental health patient being administered pentobarbital twice on one day for execution…. Then to wake up from coma after six days because her blood stream could not accept the lethal injection for execution … only to wake up disoriented and para...

  Leaving wildlife habitat inviolate is in the interest of securing Human Beings’ future By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse The Government of Karnataka has rejected the CEC (Central Empowered Committee) statute to protect the buffer of Bannerghatta Biological Park, is politically expedient, and detrimental to future generations. The Central Empowered Committee’s recommendations to conserve a 100 square kilometre circumference of the Biological Park is based on ecological imperatives. But it’s a gold standard that ought not to be compromised… in the interest of sustaining food security, water security of future generations. The forest comprises of deciduous and moist deciduous forest types. Together with rocky outcrops, terrain, micro climate, moisture content and biota it makes a crucial catchment area for North-East Monsoons on which Bangalore is heavily dependent. The terrain works perfectly to drain out the heavy rain. But the unplanned Anthropocene development is stiflin...

  Not conserving the Western Ghats – a Biodiversity Hotspot is unwise, to say the least By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse In rejecting the Kasturirangan Committee’s recommendations to notify the (Karnataka stretch) of the Western Ghats – a Biodiversity Hotspot – as Eco Sensitive Area, the Karnataka Government has erred, to say the very least. Albeit the Karnataka government seeking a one-year time frame / gap to notify the Western Ghats – as an Eco Sensitive Area, it reeks of ad-hocism, because the political leadership seems unwilling to compromise the interests of livelihoods of people. In doing so the government is compromising on critical conservation of life forms and resources – the very resource that they need to survive. The pressure of development – power stations, mining, dams, highways, industries, plantations, schools and colleges all find real estate only in these fragile forests. SC AIR 302 / 95 a Mandamus Continuum –that is also referred to as Godhavarman v...

  CITES laws are more practised in the breach, in India # UNCBD COP 17 Curtain raiser By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse The discovery and rescue of abandoned trafficked Orangutans from presumably Borneo / Malaysia or Indonesia made great news headlines last week. News anchors were screaming that they were trafficked from thousands of kilometres away from East Asia. That itself made amusing news because they so called anchors obviously did not know where exactly Orangutans hail from, and the news anchors most definitely did not know how many ‘thousands’ of kilometres the startled disoriented baby Orangs may have travelled from in suffocating conditions. Orangutans in Asia correspond to Grey and Silverback Gorillas of Africa. The term Orangutan in Bahasa roughly translates to native ape ‘of Asia’. Not just such charismatic mammals as Orangutans but elephants, tigers, leopards, snow leopards, birds like peacocks, cockatoos, Bears of all varieties, Spotted Deer, Macaws, sta...