Southern States - Andhra Pradesh   

Medha Patkar asks people to save natural resources

By Our Special Correspondent

VIJAYAWADA FEB. 18. The social activist, Medha Pathkar, has exhorted people to assert their right over resources like land, water, forests, and minerals by opposing privatisation and globalisation policies on one hand and communalism on the other.

She was here on Tuesday as part of her nation-wide tour to mobilise public support for the agitation to save the nation and build it. She said she began the tour on January 26 from Palakkad in Kerala where people have been fighting against Coca Cola for exploiting their water resources. The tour will end in Ayodhya on March 30.

Speaking to newspersons here, Ms. Pathkar, who is the coordinator of the National Alliance for People's Movements (NAPM), stressed the need to decentralise polity and resource management to help people derive benefits with less investment. She said every drop of water should be conserved at the place it falls on land with local initiative rather than by building large dams which would bring in more droughts.

She dubbed the inter-linking of rivers a mirage. She pointed out that it would cost Rs. 5,60,000 crores, which is double the amount spent on all the irrigation projects in the country in the last 50 years.

She supported the separate Telangana agitation and felt that it would become a reality one day. She said though 80 per cent of the catchment area of the Krishna lies in Telangana the region was deprived of its rightful share leading to gross injustice.

She pointed out that the then Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao initiated globalisation policies and L.K. Advani started his rath yatra on the Ayodhya issue. The two issues -- globalisation and communalisation -- have been going on since then. She said NAPM was fighting for decentralisation of polity and resources as an alternataive paradigm to globalisation and communalism.

She wanted intellectuals to come together, organise and haul up elected representatives on all issues relating to exploitation of natural resources by MNCs depriving the local people. Asked about what her solution to the Ayodhya tangle would be, she said it should be left to the local people to sort out.

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