India’s Ramesh Agrawal wins Goldman Prize

NEW DELHI: Ramesh Agrawal received this year’s Goldman Prize for helping villagers fight a large coal mine in Chhattisgarh state, the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation said Monday.
Five other environmental advocates from Peru, Russia and three other nations have won this year’s prize, which is awarded annually for grass-roots activism.
Peru’s Ruth Buendia was recognized for helping to prevent construction of two large dams that would have displaced nearly 10,000 indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon, and Russian zoologist Suren Gazaryan won for defending protected areas around Sochi from illegal land seizures for Olympic construction projects, it said. American lawyer Helen Slottje received the award for helping communities fight fracking in New York State by discovering a legal loophole that allows individual towns to ban the oil extraction method under zoning laws.