Cut.In Students’ Film Festival and Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) announce a video competition on the theme of the ‘Commons’.
The Commons are resources that are neither ‘private’ nor ‘public’ (government) but are owned or shared by a community. The term emphasizes that the resource belongs to the people and therefore should serve larger purposes than those afforded by the market. The commons can be classified as two, the natural commons and the built commons.
The natural commons are the land, water, air and their combinations such as the forest, seas, and rivers inclusive of the life in them. It includes what is on, above and under the ground. These are the finite resources. While collectively owned knowledge systems, culture, music and the arts are infinite and require management of social relationships.
The built commons are – infrastructure built with public resources – crèches, schools, roads, government buildings, etc., and the knowledge superstructure which determines inclusion, access, benefit and control of these infrastructures. With the progress of science, newer commons are being identified such as electromagnetic spectrum and space itself.
The commons is a social system – a governance system where the community determines the limit on the use of the shared resource, allocation of access rights to all and monitors the usage based on principles of inclusion and equity. It is a system that acknowledges the capability of the community to protect, preserve and manage their commons in a sustainable manner. The health of the commons is intrinsically linked to the health of the community in such a tight correlation that one cannot exist without the other. As long as a community is willing and able to defend its commons, that commons will survive and so will the community. The commons are not external to human beings but include the humans within them – ‘we are the living commons’. Today we are at the threshold of another major global shift. Collaboration and commons are the way to the future.
Commons Initiative:
Common Pool Resources or Commons play a critical role in maintaining the ecological balance, providing essential resources to sustain life and livelihoods, particularly of the poor, ensuring food security and meeting rural energy and fodder requirements. Over the years, there has been a steady decline both in the extent and in the quality of common lands, largely on account of changes in land use, collapse of governance mechanisms, an absence of clear tenure and the allocation of these lands for other purposes.
Commons in India have been continuously projected as ‘wastelands’ and are being diverted for alternate land uses. Increasingly, common lands are being viewed as sites for biofuel cultivation, corporate contract farming and industrial zones. Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) launched the ‘Commons Initiative’ in 2009 with the objective of building strategic collaborations to influence policies and programmatic action on Commons in India. It includes a range of initiatives aimed at enhancing research, documentation, media attention and initiating a process for long-term campaigns on the Commons.
Commons Campaign in Rajasthan
In Rajasthan, FES has been working closely with the Government to facilitate the development of a Common Land Policy for the state. FES has agreed to assist the Government of Rajasthan on a year long campaign launched in September 2011 called the ‘Shamlat Abhiyan’, to create awareness on the importance and criticality of the Commons and to initiate actions to map and restore them.
The term Samlat/Samlati is still used widely in village common law in some of the northern states of India like Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana. The term had its origins in the Mughal era Urdu/Farsi term ‘Shamil’ meaning to include (in Arabic ‘comprehensive’, ‘inclusive’, ‘universal’ and even ‘perfect’). ‘Shamilat’ approximates to ‘inclusive’ or ‘shared’, both of which are core values of the commons.
Call for Public Service Advertisements and Short Documentaries:
The objective of this video competition is to create awareness on the issue of Commons and encourage citizens to take action to protect, preserve and manage their commons. The idea is to affirm the importance of the commons to the very existence and survival of humankind, to critique the threats to commons in contemporary society and to seek ways in which each one of us could contribute to the commons vision.
The PSAs and short docus could focus on both rural and urban commons, such as natural resources (land, water, forests), cultural commons (collective knowledge systems, music, the arts), public property and new commons such as the Internet.
Conditions:
The competition is open to PSAs and short documentaries.
The maximum duration of the PSA should 90 secs and the minimum should be 30 secs.
The maximum duration of the short documentary is 45 mins.
Each applicant can send in more than one entry.
The entries should have been produced between January 2010 and November 2012.
The entrant should have been a student at the time of production and will have to produce a letter from the educational institution in support of the application.
There are four prizes- Gold and Silver for the best PSAs and Gold and Silver for the best short documentaries. The prizes are in the form of trophies and there is no cash prize.
In addition, a set ofgood PSA entries will be chosen for use in ‘Shamlat Abhiyan’, currently underway in Rajasthan to be broadcast on DD-Rajasthan, ETV Rajasthan and AIR and/or narrowcast, reaching out to 9166 Gram Panchayats in the state. They may also be used as part of the larger Commons Initiative across other states in India. These shortlisted entries will get a certificate of merit.
The last date for entries in this category is November 15, 2012.
For information on the ‘Commons’ please refer to the following links:
http://www.fes.org.in/
http://onthecommons.org/
http://commons.fes.org.in/
http://www.slideshare.net/OpenSpace/vocabulary-of-commons
http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/
For more information on the theme please contact:
Kiran Kumari: kiran@fes.org.in
Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) has been working towards conservation of natural resources in the ecologically fragile and degraded regions of the country for more than two decades. Its efforts lie in locating forests and other natural resources within the prevailing economic, social and ecological dynamics in rural landscapes and in intertwining principles of conservation and local self-governance for the protection of natural surroundings and improvement in the living conditions of the poor. FES presently works with more than 3000 village institutions in 27 districts across seven states, and assists the village communities in managing and governing 1.73 thousand hectares of commons lands covering revenue wastelands, degraded forests lands and Panchayat grazing lands.
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