State to give 80 per cent of sand mine auction profit to panchayats

THE Jharkhand government has announced it will give 80 per cent of the amount collected from auction of sand mines in the state to block panchayats. This is the first time a state has decided to share business profits with local bodies.

Hemant Soren, deputy chief minister and minister in-charge of the department of mines and geology, made the announcement on August 11. “The decision has been approved by the state Cabinet,” he added.

There is growing support for characterizing ecosystem services in order to link conservation and human well-being. However, few studies have explicitly included ecosystem services within systematic conservation planning, and those that have follow two fundamentally different approaches: ecosystem services as intrinsically-important targeted benefits vs. substitutable co-benefits. We present a first comparison of these two approaches in a case study in the Central Interior of British Columbia.

The growth of militant left radicalism, known as the Naxalite movement in official documents and civil society discussions, has acquired considerable prominence in the public policy discourse, media coverage and interaction with social scientists. The subject has also been deliberated upon in seminars across the country. The Government policy to deal with it has also polarised thinking on how it should be understood and characterised and what would be the most appropriate approach to neutralise its influence.

The new Mines and Mineral Development and Regulation (MMDR) Bill, 2011 will ensure that the industry shares its profits with affected people. This is a special report by Down To Earth on this bill that will make mining companies shell out Rs 10,500 crore a year for affected people.

Independent India inherited a structure of landholdings characterised by heavy concentration of cultivable areas in the hands of relatively large absentee landowners, the excessive fragmentation of small landholdings, growing number of landless agricultural workers, and the lack of any generalised system of documentary evidence of landownership or tenancy.

Approach to conserve biodiversity for sustainable development should be targeted at different levels, from improving living standards to changing the attitude of people. If Himalayan medicinal plants are to continue to serve the needs of the people without being reduced to a dangerously unstable resource base, they have to be considered in the perspective of sound ecological management that also has economic benefits to the local people.

Biofuels could help poor nations modernize, but scaling up aid supported projects to commercial operations is far from easy.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7352_supp/full/474S018a.html

Bioenergy could help bring food security to the world's poorest continent, say Lee R. Lynd and Jeremy Woods.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7352_supp/full/474S020a.html