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 …
STRINGENT environmental stipulations and falling quality, due to techniques used to boost production, have resulted in a crisis in the high-tech, $2.8 billion a year Dutch flower industry. Dutch growers are also hurting because of increasing competition from southern European countries, Israel and some developing countries, which has reduced prices …
RICH INDIVIDUALS usually tend to be arrogant. So do rich institutions, such as the World Bank, which is prepared to accept, albeit after much pushing and prodding, that it may have been wrong in hindsight. But it is definitely not prepared to accept, at any given moment, that it is …
A DEBATE on how best to count the tiger population sparked talk of hidden cameras and 3-D photographs at a symposium earlier this year. But most delegates agreed in the end that none of the methods suggested is any more reliable and economical than the pugmark census. The delegates were …
IT IS SAD that the World Health Assembly did not accept the suggestion of AIDS campaigner Jonathan Mann, that the candidate for the director-generalship of the World Health Organisation take part in a globally broadcast debate on health issues. Mann, a candidate himself, was interested, of course, in pursuing his …
WRITTEN jointly by a sociologist and an anthropologist, the book raises hopes of providing an understanding of uneven development within cultural and historical paradigms. Unfortunately, the reader is left disappointed. The connections made in the book between culture and development are astounding. In Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru attributes India's …
An Act to provide for the prohibition of employment of manual scavengers as well as construction or continuance of dry latrines and for the regulation of construction and maintenance of water-seal latrines and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.
THE TIGER census has been used for long as a convenient official yardstick to measure the success of national park management. But a dispute on the exact tiger population has set a census under way in Ranthambore national park that has the authorities on edge. Since Project Tiger was launched …
HUGE PROFITS are the main reason for the recent spurt in tiger poaching. A Royal Bengal tiger is a walking goldmine because its skin and bones are worth Rs 4.5 lakh. And, there is money to be made at every stage in the illegal tiger trade. Tiger skins have traditionally …
NO ONE raises an eyebrow when children are required to memorise multiplication tables till 19. Then, why should anyone throw a fit if students are taught how to multiply 199 by 199 without resorting to multiplication tables, simply because the method used is Vedic mathematics? The resurgence of interest in …
JAGADGURU Swami Sri Bharathi Krishna Tirthaji Maharaj, the author of Vedic Mathematics, says he discovered 16 mathematical formulae, which once formed part of the parishishta (appendix) of the Atharva Veda. But the formulae are not to be found in any extant text of the Vedas. The foundations of Vedic mathematics, …
A FEW examples can demonstrate the reach of Krishna Tirtha's work, which contain several patterns of calculations to be used according to the nature of the problem needing to be solved: To multiply 785 by 362 using the conventional method, you would first multiply by 2, then by 6 and …
TO ASSESS the teaching power of Krishna Tirtha's book, take an example from geometry. Schoolchildren are familiar with Pythagoras' theorem that states the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. This theorem is proved in standard …
Bhaskara II investigated solutions to the equation (100x + 90)/63 = y, where x and y have to be positive integers (whole numbers). One possible solution is x = 1530 and y = 2430. In the ancient Indian tradition, examples were invariably used because there were no algebraic generalisations. But …
Why has park protection become so difficult? The government has banned villagers from entering the forest but without giving them an alternative. When they force their way in, claiming it is their right, we are authorised to stop them. But how effective are such powers without weapons? We can arrest …
SONRAJ IN THE Uttar Pradesh village of Sonrai, water-starved residents eke out a living growing a single, rainfed crop of jowar or kodo (millet) on 500 sandy ha and by mining granite, phosphate or lead the rest of the time. The village averages 85 cm of rain annually, sufficient to …
AFTER a successful swoop on a dusty April afternoon on some poachers in the Keladevi forests near Ranthambore Tiger Reserve (RTR), a posse of nine forest guards in a Jeep found their way blocked by a log. They got out to clear the road and were ambushed by armed members …
THE MUCH-lauded Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) has failed as an instrument to transform rural India. And not all the high praise from the prime minister or the government's hiking of the JRY budget or the speedy enactment of the Panchayati Raj bill, ostensibly to empower village-level institutions, can mask this …
HEAT ALWAYS flows from a hotter body to a cooler one, according to the second law of thermodynamics. But then why is the Sun's atmosphere hotter, by several million degrees, than its surface where all the energy is generated? Astrophysicist Jack Scudder has furnished an ingenious mechanism to explain how …
Even as Union finance minister Manmohan Singh proclaimed the success of liberalisation and globalisation of the country's economy before World Bank officials in April this year, the Clinton administration targeted India for discriminatory sanctions under the Special 301 provisions of the US Trade Act. This is the third time since …
A solar still, developed at the Centre for Energy Studies (CES) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi to make waste and saline water potable, has sparked a controversy concerning its inventor. According to a report in the British journal, New Scientist, the solar still's improved version was …
