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 …
THE COVER story of this issue of Down To Earth proves that Indian companies have a considerable potential to reduce wastes and hence, their waste treatment costs. Last year, India became the first country in the world to require environmental audits by law. But the results of this statute, at …
WHEN TECHNOLOGY, tradition and poverty combine to alter the sex ratio in India, who will point a finger and call us murderers? A foreign television network, if it is disposed to spend the time and money turning up evidence in obscure corners of the country. Last month, the BBC did …
"IF TISSUE culture companies can make profits, why can't villagers?" asks C R Raju, who has developed a tissue culture technique that he claims is cheap and easily transferable to the people -- a feat research laboratories are still to achieve. Raju developed the low-cost technique as part of voluntary …
IT DID not happen in Latur alone. Earthquakes can and do occur in what geologists generally consider peaceful regions of the earth. The 1819 Kutch earthquake and the 1886 Charleston earthquake in South Carolina, USA, are two famous examples of such rare errant behaviour of the earth. Both quakes were …
JUST BEFORE 4 am on September 30, the stylus tracing out the narrow, wavy line on the seismographs at the Indian Meteorological Department's (IMD) seismological observatory in Delhi began to oscillate violently. As the graphs rolling out of the machine's printer began to indicate an earthquake 1,400 km away, the …
AFTER a nearly two-year break, Karnataka's pioneering panchayati raj experiment will continue in December and January, when elections will be held to village, taluka and district bodies under a new panchayati raj act. But in the run-up to the elections, the campaign to oust Karnataka chief minister M Veerappa Moily …
GRAM SABHA: The gram sabha (village assembly) lies at the base of the structure in both acts. It meets at least twice annually to review development programmes and select beneficiaries. MANDAL PANCHAYAT: Under the 1983 act, this primary, elected tier was located between the village and taluka and covered a …
THOUGH panchayati raj laws were revised in Karnataka in 1987, few attempts were made to let the poor manage their natural resources. The rural elite usurped the local bodies and used them to pursue their own interests. Says a cynical Shivamurthy Swamy of the Taralabalu Rural Development Foundation, "The panchayati …
IN A LANDMARK judgement in 1980, the Supreme Court (SC) ordered Madhya Pradesh's Ratlam municipality to clean a locality, holding that budgetary constraints didn't justify a municipality neglecting its statutory obligation to provide sanitation facilities. It also made it mandatory for a magistrate to remove a public nuisance wherever one …
CANCERS occur when some cells break free from the body's control and multiply prolifically. That's the classical view. But now there is a new way of looking at cancer -- it may be because cells are not dying fast enough. Advocates of this novel view are confident that if death-defying …
IT WAS the British who first documented the practice of female infanticide in India. One of the better known examples is the discovery by A Walker, British political agent at Baroda, of mass female infanticide among the Jadeja Rajputs of Saurashtra in 1805. The practice was prevalent even among the …
Indian industry has once again disregarded a government deadline to implement compulsory environment audit. The scheme requires all manufacturing units to list such details as materials used, sources of energy and effluent constituents. By August 30, manufacturing units were to have submitted evidence of having carried out these audits to …
VIOLENT aggression in humans may be because of a genetic defect, a recent Dutch study suggests. Han G Brunner and his colleagues at the University Hospital in Nijmegen report that a change in the gene coding for an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) may be responsible for unprovoked, aggressive …
Three years ago, an Orissa engineer's claims to have solved Fermat's Last Theorem was ignored by the state government. However, news that Andrew Wiles of the US has solved the long-standing puzzle has now prompted the state government to sponsor the engineer's trip to England to present his finding to …
AN INDIAN scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests ordinary tubelights can be used to cheaply disinfect water, especially in rural areas. "It's not as if I have discovered something new," says Ashok Gadgil. "In fact, breweries, bakeries and pharmaceutical laboratories use mercury vapour lamps (such as tubelights) to …
Swarms of locusts that descended over Rajasthan about two months ago seem to have played havoc not only with standing crops but with the flow of information as well: there is hardly any assertion about controlling locusts and the extent of damage caused by them that is not contradicted. The …
The American multinational company Cargill Inc has abandoned a proposal to establish a $15-million salt manufacturing unit near Kandla port in Gujarat. The decision came on the eve of a satyagraha planned by Janata Dal leader George Fernandes on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, who led the salt protest …
In a severe indictment of the World Bank's (WB) record of resettlement of people affected by its projects in India, the bank's own Operations Evaluation Division (OED) has recommended that funding of projects involving forcible relocation of people should be stopped. OED says a February 1980 policy makes the bank …
SORTING out similar types of plastics from waste may now be possible through a system based on the different ways various plastics reflect a near-infrared light (Environmental Science and Technology, Vol 27, No 7). The different reflection patterns are then analysed by an artificial nerve-like computer programme, which is "trained …
A TEAM of US scientists has developed a technique to enable hand-held computers that work with a pen to recognise handwriting quickly and more accurately than their present level of literacy allows them (Science Vol 260, No 5115). The new system, which has been developed by Rohini Srihari, Stayvis Ng, …
