GDC Khaltse Conducts Cleanliness Drive and Poster Making Competition under Mission Clean Indus
12/08/2025
Khaltse, August 11 (KIP)-As part of Mission Clean Indus 2025, Government Degree College Khaltse conducted a cleanliness drive on its campus today. The entire college community, including students and faculty, actively participated, cleaning classrooms, the library, the girls’ hostel, and surrounding areas. A poster-making competition themed “Mission Clean Indus” was also organized for students. Sonam Gyasto and Tsewang Dorjay secured first place, Sonam Yangdol and Rigzin Tsomo took second, and Rinchen Dolker and Stanzin Chukit begged third.
Dr. Sameena Iqbal, Principal of the college, praised the enthusiastic involvement of students and faculty, urging them to continue supporting the mission’s objectives.
Between 350-400 Adivasi Indigenous people from across South India gathered at the gates of Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in Karnataka state to protest forced evictions from their ancestral lands.
The two-day protest demanded that tourist safaris stop until Adivasis forest rights are recognized.
More than 50 police officers showed up. When tourist vehicles arrived, the police threatened protesters with arrest if they blocked the park entrance. On Sunday, the protest closed off access to the park for an hour. Some tourists, upon learning of the Adivasi cause, turned in their tickets and declined to enter the reserve.
“This protest is not just a symbolic event, but a powerful struggle to assert our rights," said a statement from Nagarahole Adivasi Jamma Paale Hakku Sthaapane Samiti (NAJHSS)
The protesters erected a sign at the park entrance which says, in part: “Nagarahole forest is the sacred customary lands of Adivasi clans and families living here. You are now entering the traditional boundaries of the Adivasi peoples. Nagarahole is a self-governing area of the Adivasi people of Nagarahole. These forests are the habitat of the Adivasi people. In this ancestral territory, people, animals, and the forest are equals.”
An estimated 20,000 Jenu Kuruba people have been illegally evicted from Nagarhole. Another 6,000 resisted and have managed to stay in the park. For decades it has been official policy in India, as in many other countries around the world, to evict Indigenous people whose lands are turned into Protected Areas, a practice known as Fortress Conservation.
In addition to those already evicted, nearly 400,000 Indigenous people in India are currently under the threat of losing their homes to protected areas.
In a press release by the protesters (see attached) they ask, “Why are we being made slaves in other people’s lands and branded as encroachers on our lands that we inherited from our ancestors?”