Category: Sociology

Conservation from the Margins

Conservation from the Margins
The diverse landscape of India is home to globally important wildlife species and habitats. However, a rapidly growing economy and human population, along with socio-political issues such as ethnic and political marginalisation, have serious, if often unrecognised, impacts on this vast biodiversity.
While some of India’s conservation issues the tiger and elephant conservation, mining and global warming have gained currency in media and policy discourse, several others remain confined only to the academic world of conservation biologists and environmental activists and rarely enter either public consciousness or public policy. Conservation from the Margins talks about some of these neglected conservation issues.
Conservation and environmental degradation cannot be confined to domains of only the state and activists, communities are also actively engaged with their natural surroundings. the essays in this volume do not merely analyse the ecological aspects of these environmental problems unidimensionally, instead, they examine the complex intersection of the natural with the social.
The chapters range from the realities of illegal wildlife trade in India to the impact of naxalism on the Palamau Tiger Reserve and from conservation in marine fisheries to identity politics in the Gangetic fisheries. the result of extensive fieldwork done by some of the finest biologists and sociologists across the country, the book highlights the personal experiences of the scientists to understand and resolve the issues.
While the stories told are specific to India, the overarching questions this volume raises about conservation are relevant to the developing world, particularly to Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
This volume will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of environmental studies, sociology, ecology and conservation.
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Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality

Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality

After seventy years of independence, the tragic reality is that the schools we attend and the quality of education we receive are influenced by our identity; who we are, where we live, how much we earn and our gender.

In Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality, Vimala Ramachandran explores the contours of a school system that is facing a crisis of legitimacy. While India aspires to march towards a knowledge driven society and economy, millions of young people are left behind. Those who can afford march out of government schools only to realize that the private schools (barring the elite schools) are no better. The schools they attend leaves them with little knowledge or skill, a very low self-esteem and a bleak future.

The inequalities in the larger society are reflected in the school system and the elite schools to which the majority of the children have no access, stand apart from the rest. The book argues that the struggle for equality in education, in all schools, is ultimately a struggle for quality, both being two sides of the same coin.

Buy the book Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality from Ideakart.com.