Judgment of the Supreme Court in the matter of In Re: Zudpi Jungle Lands. A batch of applications involved a peculiar issue concerning the situation prevailing in the six districts of eastern Vidarbha region namely Nagpur, Wardha, Bhandara, Gondia, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli. The issue pertains to the status of the …
Life on earth may have started after an asteroid banged into her. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California say that an asteroid collided with Earth between 3.6 and 4 billion years ago, thawing her frozen oceans and creating the right conditions for life to begin humming (New …
The people dependent for sustenance on Delhi's largest green belt, "the Ridge", are trapped in the power-grabbing crossfire between the Delhi Administration and various other agencies. The Delhi Administration's environment and forest department has decided to convert the Ridge into a reserved forest and has locked horns with the Delhi …
"India's nuclear programme today is a dangerous failure." That was the opinion that emerged during Sixty Minutes, a programme telecast by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) of USA in February. "The truth of the failure of the programme has been hidden from the people," said Dhirendra Sharma, convener of the …
How many people can nature sustain? A proposed capacity study of the Kochi region of Kerala intends to find this out. The study of natural resources in the region to sustain a given population will be conducted by the Nagpur-based National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI). The 2-year multi-disciplinary study, …
DINOSAURS roar and gallumph across the widescreen and the world watches spellbound. Steven Spielberg"s classic film, Jurassic Park, tells the story of extinct dinosaurs brought to life in a petri dish from genetic material that is all of 65 million years old. This is fiction with a good dose of …
The battle to raise hopes and lower the heightTHIS is the kind of demagoguery that haunts the Sardar Sarovar Project. The late Gujarat Chief Minister, Chimanbhai Patel, had used the emotive words jeevan dori (lifeline) to cement the project on an emotional platform from which, with infinite political cunning, it …
INTELLECTUAL property rights (IPRs) may soon lay claim to and govern the formally codified genetic resources of India. Unfortunately, very few rights and privileges are likely to be created to protect the centuries-deep informal knowledge people have about biological resources. Two proposed legislations -- the Plant Varieties Bill (PVB) of …
THERE was something questionable and baffling about the closure of the construction sluices on the Sardar Sarovar dam on February 23 this year. First, the suddenness of it: the Narmada Bachao Andolan says that 40 families were still present at Vadgam and were affected by the closure when the sluicedoors …
NOT SO long ago you had to run to the local polyglot to get a missive in an unfamiliar language deciphered. Come computers and you can now read that blasted letter without supercilious help. The key to multilingual ability lies in a software called Apex Language Processor (ALP), which transforms …
FOR INDIA'S aged citizenry, some good news lies ahead. The country is expected to have 76 million 60-plus people by the turn of this century, but the government's response remains blinkered to pension schemes. Now, many voluntary groups have taken on the work of providing care and warmth to the …
A SMOOTHLY moving bus suddenly comes to a screeching halt and you are jerked forward. You purple the air around the driver with invectives as you recover from the jolt. But if you remember your physics lessons well, you'll know that the driver isn't to blame. Inertia, or the tendency …
SCIENCE is a double-edged sword, as curative as a missionary and incomprehensibly barbaric in more or less equal measure. After decades of rampant scientism, there is now a perception that it is deeply and irretrievably dehumanising, a Faustian pact with the devil. Galileo was imprisoned 400 years ago because his …
IT NEEDS little imagination to realise that a degraded environment undermines human health. But the linkage between a deteriorating environment, economy and increased health vulnerability needs to be seriously examined. Of still greater importance is the necessity to integrate health interventions with local needs to reverse the downward spiral. The …
What are you doing to check the massive deforestation in the Amazonian rainforests? In the past three years, we have been able to substantially reduce the annual rate of deforestation from 20,000 sq km to 9,000 sq km. And how did you achieve this? In Brazil, fire is the only …
THE government's efforts to develop legislation to control access to the country's wild as well as cultivated biodiversity are indeed laudable: the ministry of agriculture has already prepared a bill to control the use of cultivated biodiversity and the ministry of environment and forests is working on a bill that …
CALCUTTA is moving backwards. Blessed with a benign tramway system -- a century-old system that is now being seen as a radical solution to traffic snarls and smog -- that has stood the test of urban chaos, it ought by rights to have been expanded and fortified. Instead, the West …
THE largely deprecatory reports in the Indian media about the proposed import of Dutch dung have missed a key point. The idea seems to sound so outlandish because dung is a lowly thing in the perception of the modern Indian middle class. But if India can import chemical fertilisers, which …
NOTED environmental activist and writer Anupam Mishra's recent book on tanks is a significant contribution to environmental studies for at least three reasons: first, it establishes the historical and continuing role for, and the current relevance of, traditional water conservation, irrigation, and drinking water systems, even faced with the state's …
THE LAST patches of virgin rainforest in Kerala are up for grabs for anyone with an axe who can cut around bureaucracy. Although the state government maintains that the state's forest cover is 27.83 per cent, independent observers stress that it is actually less than 10 per cent. And they …
THE Brazilian minister for environment, Rubens Ricupero, says that Western politicians, NGOs and the media betray the attitude that Third World countries look for what he calls the "lowest common denominator" in international negotiations. These dirty and inefficient cousins apparently force the rest of the world community to settle for …
