Accentuating environmental degradation: Impact on development
Dr. Shamsul Alam Mohan and Offoh Priscilla Ifeoma
News
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Rs. 3,720 m for rural road development
The Government has allocated Rs.3,720 million in 2008 to improve and maintain the rural road network countrywide under the Maga Neguma programme to achieve socio-economic development, mobility, connectivity and accessibility needs of the people. Acting Minister for Highways and Road Development, T.B. Ekanayake told the Daily News that 1,208 kms of rural roads have been identified for improvement in this year. The development will take place at district level under the Maga Neguma programme.
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'Per capita water availability reduces to alarming figure'
Per capita water availability in Pakistan reduced to an alarming figure of 1070 cubic meter in 2007 while the country has lost the storage capacity equivalent to 5.13 MAF due to silting in the reservoirs of Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma.
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Economics of handloom weaving: A field study in Andhra Pradesh
Based on fieldwork, this paper examines the problems and prospects of the handloom sector in Andhra Pradesh. One major finding is that the growth performance of cooperatives determines the growth of other institutions
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Building boomers and fragmentation of space in Mumbai
The Maharashtra government has extended the transfer of development rights instrument
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The interesting times we live in
Public health issues are inextricably linked with human rights and it is only apt that many health professionals will involve themselves in such issues. The response of governments and the corporate sector to the work of such professionals suggests how they are seen as threats to the established order.
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Bring on the solar revolution
We have heard all about Al Gore's inconvenient truths on climate change. Now comes an extremely convenient truth from his German counterpart. Social Democrat MP Hermann Scheer, who has been dubbed more revolutionary than Greenpeace, says the great unspoken truth is how painless it will be to convert the world to renewable energy, especially solar power. So much so that the Kyoto protocol is a waste of time that makes what is easy and cheap seem hard and expensive.
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On the Naxalite movement: A report with a difference
The report, Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, authored by an expert group set up by the Planning Commission, looks at the Naxalite/Maoist movement in a way that is different from the prevalent official attitude and draws attention to many of the positive effects of the movement. The report rejects the official "security-centric' approach in dealing with the movement and instead suggests an "ameliorative approach with emphasis on a negotiated solution'.
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New mesh gives net gains against mosquitoes
Get a good night's sleep: bed nets designed to stop mosquitoes in their tracks are undergoing large-scale trials in India and Tanzania. The German firm BASF has developed a polymer mesh whose cross-linked structure can retain a pyrethroid insecticide inside it for 25 washes, yet still allows enough of the chemical to diffuse to the surface to "knock down" nearly all the mosquitoes that land on it.
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Cheap carbon trap cleans up power station emissions
One way to combat global warming is by sequestering the carbon dioxide belched out by power stations, locking it away in buried vaults. A big problem, though, is that only about a tenth of the gas produced by burning fossil fuels is CO2. Most of the rest is nitrogen, which is not a greenhouse gas and would needlessly take up space in the vault. But separating the two gases can be a costly affair. Now a team led by Maciej Radosz at the University of Wyoming in Laramie say they have designed a cheap filter that could capture 90 per cent or more of the CO2 emitted by power stations.
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Nanotubes could cause lung disease like asbestos
Could nanotechnology revive an old killer? That's the fear being raised by the discovery that carbon nanotubes shred the lung lining in a similar way to asbestos fibres. Ken Donaldson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues injected carbon nanotubes into the abdominal cavity of mice. One week later, the tissue surrounding the abdominal organs of the mice showed a level of inflammation similar to that caused by asbestos exposure.
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'Self-digesting' biofuel plants could ease food crisis
Make clean fuel or feed the world? That's the dilemma facing biofuel producers now that the world food crisis is making the turning of food crops into biofuel seem increasingly irresponsible. But maybe there's a way out. Mariam Sticklen of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues have engineered a fuel plant to make its own cellulases - a bit like oil that refines itself into petroleum.
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Earth may hide a lethal carbon cache
Carbon is locked away down in the Earth's crust: in magma and old carbonate rocks buried by plate tectonics, in fossil fuels like coal and oil, and in ice lattices beneath the ocean bed. It has long been assumed that this carbon was largely cut off from the surface, and could safely be ignored when analysing the effect of greenhouse gases on climate. Now it seems there may be much more "deep carbon" ready to spew out than we thought.
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Can we trust Atlantic hurricane prediction?
A major modelling study forecast that warming of the north Atlantic could make hurricanes scarcer - while the worst ones might have stronger winds and produce more rain. Thomas Knutson and colleagues from NASA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, have previously produced a remarkably accurate year-by-year "hindcast" of hurricane numbers over the past 30 years. So their prediction of an 18 per cent decline in the annual hurricane count by late this century commands attention.
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ANA eyes cutting CO2 emissions by 200,000 tons
All Nippon Airways Co said Thursday it will aim to slash annual carbon dioxide emissions stemming from its domestic flight operations by 200,000 tons as part of efforts to become a leading eco-friendly airline. ANA said it is the first time that an air carrier has set a numerical target for reduced CO2 emissions. The airline plans to curb average annual CO2 emissions from domestic flight operations to about 4.7 million tons from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2011, compared with about 4.9 million tons in fiscal 2006 through March 2007.
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Poverty of policy
The current food crisis has been largely policy-driven, which is probably good news because it means that policies can also reverse the process.
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The business of protest (editorial)
From SLAPPs to hiring professional protesters, industry's working overtime to find new ways to attack. In the first week of April this year, a group of men came and stood outside the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi. They carried placards with offensive slogans directed at me. We understood the picket to be the latest in a dangerous pesticide industry mindgame.
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Shock in the rice bowl
Precisely when many in the developed bloc were frantically counting their money at the height of a surreal shock over subprime rate, the globalising world was jolted by a potential crisis of subsistence that would hit the poor and other vulnerable sections very hard. Is there a link, therefore, between the slippery subprime banking rate and the soaring prices of rice and other staples?
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Japan, India ministers agree to further ties on climate, trade
Japan and India agreed Thursday to continue cooperation on climate change and seek a free trade agreement, with Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura telling his counterpart over the phone that strengthening relations with India is among the most important tasks in Japanese foreign policy. Komura also conveyed to Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee Japan's condolences over the series of deadly bomb blasts in northwestern India last week, and the two agreed to continue to cooperate in fighting terrorism, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.