Due to the growing popularity of the course the advisory committee asked the organisers in 2006 to look into possibilities of organizing short courses in collaboration with willing centres and departments of Universities in India as follow-up activities. As a result of a series of follow-up activities, CRG is building partnerships with many new institutions. A number of organisations and institutions have shown willingness to collaborate with CRG on this.  Besides as reported earlier CRG has collaborated with a number of institutions to organise public lectures and discussions as part of its follow-up activity. CRG remains grateful to all the organisations that have showed willingness to collaborate on programmes on forced migration.  

Fellowship Programme 

This year three fellowships were given to the participants of the Winter Course.  Tiina Kanninen came from Tampere University and spent a week at CRG in December 2007 working on the theme, Calcutta: A migrants’ City. Two Indian participants, Sanam Roohi and Ishita De will be sent to Finland for a week and they will work on guest workers in Finland in March 2008. Again details can be found in Section 15 of the report.    

Workshops Held 

Prior to the Winter Course a number of workshops were held. One workshop was held in collaboration with the Other Media, Bangalore on 13-15 July 2007. The discussion in the workshop

centred on the themes of causes, linkages and responses of internal displacement, human rights laws and instruments of protection and durable solutions. Special case studies were made in the workshop on Kudremukh industrial project and Chattisgarh where armed groups are raised to counter the militants resulting in displacement of a large number of civilians.

On 27-29 July 2007 CRG organized a workshop on ‘Dominance, Development, Displacement: Rights and the Issues of Law’ in Bhubaneswar in collaboration with Sansristi. The participants were from different parts of India. Other than CRG members the resource persons included Justice D. P. Mohapatra, Chairperson, Orissa Human Rights Commission, A. B. Tripathi (retd.), former Director General of Police, Orissa and former Rapporteur of National Human Rights Commission (New Delhi), and other scholars and activists from eastern India. Imtiaz Ahmed, professor, department of International relations, Dhaka University, Bangladesh delivered a lecture on ‘Internal Displacement in Bangladesh’ in Utkal University. This was organized by CRG and the Department of Journalism and Electronic Communication and the School of Women’s Studies, Utkal University. The third workshop was held in Kolkata on 3-6 September 2007. The highlight of the workshop was the release of the report on Development-induced Displacement in West Bengal: 1947-2000 prepared by Walter Fernandes and his colleagues. Justice Shyamal Kumar Sen, Chairperson, West Bengal Human Rights Commission inaugurated the workshop. The workshop was attended by Walter Fernandes, of Indian Social Institute, Guwahati, Monirul Hussain, Professor, Gauhati University, and a group of young human rights scholars and activists from all over India, apart from CRG’s own fellows and senior researchers.