This is P. Sainath once again asking not just Indians, but human beings to reflect for a minute on farmer suicides in India.

256,949

(Read full post at The Hindu) It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don’t change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.

Note that these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer’s suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman’s name.

A sculpture made from plastic bottles discarded at a yoga retreat becomes an artist’s environmental plea to save the severely polluted Yamuna River (Read the genesis of ‘Indra’s Cloud’ and the  full slideshow at Anne’s site)

Unfortunately the plea is practically insignificant in the bigger picture that is bottled water:

Bottled water produces up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year. According to Food and Water Watch, that plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce. And while the plastic used to bottle beverages is of high quality and in demand by recyclers, over 80 percent of plastic bottles are simply thrown away. (More at MNN)

Indra's Cloud, Vrindavan

Rai is already a lighter brown complexioned than most Indian women. Guess it’s not light enough for some.

Aishwarya Rai | Elle Magazine January 2011 Cover

For sedition.

The opinions of 22 Nobel Laureates and the International Human Rights community be damned. With this verdict it is clear that dissent in India will not be tolerated. If you don’t play by the rules, you will be silenced.

India now has her own Liu Xiaobo.

Tags: Dr. Binayak Sen, Liu Xiaobo

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One person. One vision. That’s all it takes to take on a challenge and succeed.

(1080 films) Dr Chris Reij of Vrij University Amsterdam who has followed Yacouba’s work over the past 25 years had this to say of his achievements:

Yacouba single-handedly has had more impact on…conservation than all the national and international researchers put together..In this region tens of thousands of hectares of land that was completely unproductive has been made productive again thanks to the techniques of Yacouba

DianaEl-Osta, Development & Production National Geographic Channels, International:

I think Yacouba’s story is both incredibly timely and important given the current crisis in many parts of the world with desertification.  It is also rare to find a conservation story with such an upbeat and inspirational ending.