CORPORATE CITIZEN CLAPS FOR THE DEFENCE SECRETARIAT AS IT IS PREPARING TO SEND ITS FIRST BATCH OF WOMEN OFFICERS AS DEFENCE ATTACHES FOR OVERSEAS MISSIONS
Piloted under the Nirmala Sitharaman government, it has directed the Army, Navy and the Air Force to identify qualified women officers for these overseas tasks. Selected women officers will likely be posted to missions in Europe and America. Sources said the first women officers could go out soon on the next "rotation". This decision to initiate and commission women officers in coveted overseas posting was taken earlier in the year and breaks yet another glass ceiling for women. As defined, "a military attache is a military expert who is attached to a diplomatic mission (an attache). This post is normally filled by a high-ranking military officer who retains the commission while serving in an embassy. Opportunities sometimes arise for service in the field with military forces of another state." This new directive, therefore, acknowledges the fact that while women have been occupying distinguished positions as diplomats, ambassadors and even as foreign secretaries previously, they were not very commonly posted as defence attaches. The move is expected to portray India's evolving defence related diplomacy within the scope of key international players. Recent years have seen India evolving in its diplomatic engagements significantly with key countries. Women can now get commissioned into 10 branches of the Indian Army - Army Service Corps, Electronics and Mechanical Engineers, Army Aviation, Army Air Defence, Army Ordnance Corps and Intelligence departments too. The new move to depute women attaches abroad, along with the new move to offer Permanent Commission to women officers in the Indian armed forces, works to conquer newer milestones for these lady officers and for the machinery of the defence forces from being seen as a male bastion of power and privileges!
CORPORATE CITIZEN SLAPS THE PROCESS THAT IS RIPPING APART INDIA’S NATURAL RESOURCES AND DISLODGING LOCAL TRIBALS IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS
The latest to face the brunt is Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand forest region that had got the Center's nod for open cast coal mining in Parsa. Hasdeo Arand is one of the largest connecting stretches of dense forest in central India, that covers close to 170,000 hectares. Parsa is one of the 30 coal blocks in Hasdeo Arand, owned by the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd (RVUNL). The forest range is also one of India’s last remaining confines of a continuous forest and a haven for elephants, leopards, bears and other species of plants and animals, and is a rich water reservoir. It is spread loosely connecting some parts of Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. A petition has also been recently filed by a Chhattisgarh-based tribal woman, Tarika Tarangini Larka, seeking to overturn the Center's direction and help prevent allotting of any forest land to anyone other than Adivasis residing in that particular area. Larka had sought the SC’s direction to prevent authorities from evicting tribal people and for setting up of a SIT to look into allegations of acquisition of tribal land in the country. “Since a similar matter is already pending before the bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra, the bench decided that this petition too should be placed before that bench,” said Radhika Chitkara, lawyer and researcher on forest rights. Petitions and counter-petitions might get hurled and rehurled at the legal benches; may take years to salvage historical suppression of tribal rights - the need is now to salvage the biodiversity of Hasdeo Arand and other such forest belts judiciously. Once lost, the irreversibility of ecological disaster can go beyond power generation and a loss to the next generations!
by Sangeeta Ghosh Dastidar
