The Hindu : 'Villagers must collectively fight problems'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 21, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Tamil Nadu-Chennai

'Villagers must collectively fight problems'

By Our Special Correspondent

Chennai June 20. An assessment of who benefits and who gets affected needs to be done before every step is taken towards development, academics and activists told village leaders here today.

If a particular step affected a region adversely, the people should unite to oppose it, they said at the opening session of a two-day State-level consultation of panchayat presidents on environment and unsustainable development — the role of panchayat Government.

The meeting was organised by the Human Rights Advocacy and Research Foundation, Law Trust — Neythal and the Society for Integrated Rural Development.

Inaugurating the discussion, the State Women's Commission Chairperson, V. Vasanthi Devi, said on issues such as linking of rivers, the affected needed to get together and discuss the issue. People of each of the villages should collectively think about the pros and cons. Everyone in villages was aware of the brains behind each of the problems — sand mining, water contamination or prawn farming. But a combination of fear, indifference and lack of initiative on the part of the affected people resulted in these activities going on unhindered. It was time the village panchayat chiefs took the lead and sensitised people to the need for fighting the problems afflicting the villages.

Markandeyan, former Gandhigram University Vice-Chancellor, said village councils should be given the power to distribute excess land among the landless. This was one way of ensuring eradication of poverty from villages. But now, villagers had no say over the developments occurring in their neighbourhood. The Government arbitrarily, and, on many occasions, wrongly classified agricultural land for industrial use.

The discussions today centred round protection and regeneration of water resources, extraction of minor and major minerals and its impact on livelihood and environment, damage to coastal environment and depletion of marine resources and globalisation and its impact on land and agriculture.

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