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	Charities warn India PM Modi that NGO crackdown will hurt the poor by Alertnet, World Today, agencies   May 2015   Charities warn India''s Modi that NGO crackdown will hurt the poor, by Nita Bhalla. (Alertnet)   Charities in India appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stop a government crackdown on thousands of foreign-funded non-profit groups saying it would hurt the lives of poor and marginalised people.   Since Modi came to power almost a year ago, his right-wing nationalist government has tightened surveillance on foreign-funded charities. It says some had violated the law by not disclosing details of their donations, or used overseas money to engage in "anti-national" activities.   Charities reject the accusations, but admit there may be some groups which had unintended funding discrepancies. They say authorities are using an opaque, "draconian" law on foreign funding to muzzle criticism of initiatives such as industrial projects affecting the poor and the environment.   "Funds are being frozen, intelligence reports are being selectively released to paint NGOs in poor light, disbursal of funds are being subjected to case-by-case clearance, and their activities are reportedly being placed on ''watch lists''," said an open letter to Modi signed by 171 charities and activists.   "At the moment it seems that ''compliance'' is serving as a garb to actually target those organisations and individuals whose views the government disagrees with, and indeed to monitor and stifle disagreement itself."   The letter - signed by groups such as Oxfam India, Human Rights Law Centre and the Conservation Action Trust - said the clampdown was "arbitrary, non-transparent, and without any course of administrative redress".   Last month, the government cancelled the licenses of almost 9,000 charities and blocked the bank accounts of Greenpeace India, which has led campaigns against genetically modified crops, coal mining and nuclear power projects.   Greenpeace says it now faces closure within a month due to a shortage of funds and has accused the government of "strangulation by stealth".   Big donors like the U.S.-based Ford Foundation are also being investigated. Ford Foundation faces a probe of its funding of a group run by Teesta Setalvad, a prominent rights activist and critic of Modi.   U.S. Ambassador Richard Verma to India said this week he was worried about "the potentially chilling effects" of the action against the NGOs, while Germany''s top diplomat Michael Steiner said charities should be supported for their "impressive work".   There is no official number of charities operating in India, but the government estimates there are at least two million non-profits - working in areas from conservation, education and health to protecting the rights of minorities.   A 2013 report by the home ministry said that while more than 43,500 - around 2 percent - were registered as charities which receive foreign funds in 2011/12, only 22,700 had provided details of their donations.   Home ministry officials say they were now simply enforcing the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), a law which bars overseas donations going to NGOs of a "political nature".   A leaked intelligence service report in June 2014 said local branches of organisations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and ActionAid were using foreign funds to damage the country''s economy with anti-industry campaigns.   The groups have been involved in many campaigns in which they have supported indigenous communities to successfully mobilise against big mining firms such as Vedanta and Essar.   Modi''s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government is keen increase investment in infrastructure and make it easier for businesses to buy land to boost growth.   This jars with NGOs who oppose what they say is economic development at the cost of the poor and the environment.   http://www.rtcc.org/2015/05/18/india-no-place-for-dissent-in-worlds-biggest-democracy/   Feb 2015   Rising Hindu nationalism alarms Indian Minority Communities, by Stephanie March.   A series of attacks on Catholic churches in the Indian capital has minority groups warning about the rise of Hindu nationalism under the leadership of prime minister Narendra Modi.   The latest attack follows a series of government gaffes that have offended religious minorities, including an attempt to cancel Christmas.   On Monday the leaders of St Alphonsa Catholic Church found the South Delhi house of worship had been vandalised, the fifth attack on a Catholic church in the Indian capital in recent months.   Police in Delhi claim that the attack was a robbery, but church leaders suspect something more sinister.   "The scenario is pretty bad all over India for Christians and Muslims as well, and this is certainly worrying because this is happening right under the nose of prime minister," said Father Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman for the Delhi Catholic Union.   "These attacks are certainly connected to the right wing Hindu fundamentalists whose voice is getting stronger and have been emboldened by last year''s election of the BJP."   Mr Modi''s political party, the BJP, has its roots in the Hindu fundamentalist group the RSS, which has been accused of recently trying to convert people to their religion by force.   Secularism is a sensitive topic for Mr Modi, who has been accused of not doing enough as chief minister of Gujarat state to prevent the deaths of up to 2,000 Muslims in religious riots in 2002.   The vast majority of India''s 1.2 billion people are Hindu, but there are still millions of citizens who belong to other religions, like Islam and Christianity, many of which say they are being ignored by this government.   The Modi administration recently came under fire for printing old versions of the country''s constitutional preamble in newspapers on India''s national day, a version which omitted the word "secular", which was added in 1976.   It has also been criticised for proclaiming December 25 as Good Governance Day, to mark the birthday of former BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.   "I have told the government that if they want to increase business with western countries, in particularly America, what do they think?" Father Emmanuel said.   "Do they think that America or Europe, or Australia would be happy to hear that on Christmas Day you are converting it into Good Governance Day, undermining the meaning of Christmas and of the birth of Jesus Christ - not just for Christian community in India, but what impact will it have on the rest of the Christian world?"   During his visit to India last week, US president Barack Obama used his final speech in the nation to declare that "India will succeed so long as it''s not splintered along the lines of religious faith". Visit the related web page
	Earth is undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history by Paul and Anne Ehrlich Stanford University, agencies   There is no doubt that Earth is undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history – the first since the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. According to one recent study, species are going extinct between ten and several thousand times faster than they did during stable periods in the planet’s history, and populations within species are vanishing hundreds or thousands of times faster than that. By one estimate, Earth has lost half of its wildlife during the past 40 years. There is also no doubt about the cause: We are it.   We are in the process of killing off our only known companions in the universe, many of them beautiful and all of them intricate and interesting. This is a tragedy, even for those who may not care about the loss of wildlife. The species that are so rapidly disappearing provide human beings with indispensable ecosystem services: regulating the climate, maintaining soil fertility, pollinating crops and defending them from pests, filtering fresh water, and supplying food.   The cause of this great acceleration in the loss of the planet’s biodiversity is clear: rapidly expanding human activity, driven by worsening overpopulation and increasing per capita consumption. We are destroying habitats to make way for farms, pastures, roads, and cities. Our pollution is disrupting the climate and poisoning the land, water, and air. We are transporting invasive organisms around the globe and overharvesting commercially or nutritionally valuable plants and animals.   The more people there are, the more of Earth’s productive resources must be mobilized to support them. More people means more wild land must be put under the plow or converted to urban infrastructure to support sprawling cities like Manila, Chengdu, New Delhi, and San Jose. More people means greater demand for fossil fuels, which means more greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere, perhaps the single greatest extinction threat of all. Meanwhile, more of Canada needs to be destroyed to extract low-grade petroleum from oil sands and more of the United States needs to be fracked.   More people also means the production of more computers and more mobile phones, along with more mining operations for the rare earths needed to make them. It means more pesticides, detergents, antibiotics, glues, lubricants, preservatives, and plastics, many of which contain compounds that mimic mammalian hormones. Indeed, it means more microscopic plastic particles in the biosphere – particles that may be toxic or accumulate toxins on their surfaces. As a result, all living things – us included – have been plunged into a sickening poisonous stew, with organisms that are unable to adapt pushed further toward extinction.   With each new person, the problem gets worse. Since human beings are intelligent, they tend to use the most accessible resources first. They settle the richest, most productive land, drink the nearest, cleanest water, and tap the easiest-to-reach energy sources.   And so as new people arrive, food is produced on less fertile, more fragile land. Water is transported further or purified. Energy is produced from more marginal sources. In short, each new person joining the global population disproportionately adds more stress to the planet and its systems, causing more environmental damage and driving more species to extinction than members of earlier generations.   To see this phenomenon at work, consider the oil industry. When the first well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, it penetrated less than 70 feet into the soil before hitting oil. By comparison, the well drilled by Deepwater Horizon, which famously blew up in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, began a mile beneath the water’s surface and drilled a few miles into the rock before finding oil. This required a huge amount of energy, and when the well blew, it was far harder to contain, causing large-scale, ongoing damage to the biodiversity of the Gulf and the adjacent shorelines, as well as to numerous local economies.   The situation can be summarized simply. The world’s expanding human population is in competition with the populations of most other animals (exceptions include rats, cattle, cats, dogs, and cockroaches). Through the expansion of agriculture, we are now appropriating roughly half of the energy from the sun used to produce food for all animals – and our needs are only growing.   With the world’s most dominant animal – us – taking half the cake, it is little wonder that the millions of species left fighting over the other half have begun to disappear rapidly. This is not just a moral tragedy; it is an existential threat. Mass extinctions will deprive us of many of the ecosystem services on which our civilization depends. Our population bomb has already claimed its first casualties. They will not be the last.   * Paul Ehrlich is Professor of Population Studies, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University. Anne Ehrlich is the associate director and policy coordinator of the Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University. Visit the related web page
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