Reply by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in compliance to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) order dated January 21, 2024 in the matter of ‘News item titled “Feeling anxious? Toxic air could be to blame” appearing in Times of India dated 10.10.2023’. NGT had directed CPCB to file a …
Tinytech, a mechanised oil expeller imported from India, is doing wonders for the villagers of Gokwe in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. A smallscale oil milling business in Gokwe has installed Tinytech which has helped improve the nutritional standards of impoverished villagers in this vast rural area by providing them …
A FUEL-EFFICIENT and superior quality brick-making technology is now available in India. The first vertical shaft brick kiln (VSBK) was built in 1996 at Datia in Madhya Pradesh by a group of national and international NGOS (Development Alternatives, Vol 7, No 3). The VSBK is a kiln for firing construction …
UNUSUAL stoves that make use of rice hull as fuel have been designed by some entrepreneurs in the Philippines. With rising costs of fossil fuels and firewood disappearing from forests, rice-hull stoves are increasingly becoming popular in the service industries as well as in rural households in the Philippines (Sustainable …
mike bugara, a villager of Mount Kenya in Kenya, has been an ardent conser-vationist. Inspired by the papyrus of the ancient Egyptians who made paper from leaves of maize, banana and eucalyptus trees, Bugara opted for an indigenous material: elephant dung! He boiled pot-fulls of elephant dung in his yard …
Rural households in India usually rely on lanterns for lighting. But the quality of a commonly used hurricane lantern is abysmal. It produces light equivalent to about one-tenth of that produced by a 60 watt (W) electric bulb. Another type of lantern in use
One of the principal barriers to providing electricity to low-income households is the high cost of connection and wiring of the house. Also, as power meters are expensive to instal, the users are not able to keep an account of the electricity consumed by them and often end up using …
the Viviendas del Hogar de Cristo (Christ's home dwellings, or chd ) housing project in Ecuador is a housing development organisation with a difference: it builds homes from locally-produced bamboo panels as a solution to the dreadful housing conditions of poor people living in Guayaquil. Simple and easy to construct, …
LANTANA CAMARA, a terror for cultivators, will finally see some use. Not only a menace in areas where the soil is fertile, the weed is equally at home in poor soils. Its seeds are disseminated widely by birds and have a high rate of germination. Moreover, Lantana is highly adaptable …
The natural water supply and sanitation programme initiated by the Indian government is an effort to solve sanitation problems and wastewater disposal in rural areas. In the absence of proper drains,
in our country, most of the biogas plants installed are based on cowdung. In a significant departure from the usual, the Sadar Patel Renewable Energy Research Institute, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat, has developed a biogas plant which works on kitchen waste and aquatic weeds (Rural Technology, Vol 8, No 2). Large …
general estimations have showed that nearly 60 to 65 million tonnes of fruits and vegetables are produced in India. Out of this, 20 to 35 per cent is lost due to lack of proper storage facilities (Rural Technology, Vol 13, No 1). Now, a simple cold storage system for farmers …
MAKE hay while the sun shines. The oft-repeated saying, if followed literally, can solve a major problem facing our farmers. Owing to the seasonal variations, the supply of fodder also fluctuates. While there is a flush of fodder in monsoons, the supply nose-dives in winters and summers. According to a …
BIOGAS, an asset to rural India for fuel can also provide water and manure from the plant's slurry. The biogas plant utilises animal dung and water to produce high quality gas and slurry, which can serve as an excellent manure. But since this slurry is very dilute (94-95 per cent …
UNATTRACTIVE mounds of banana peels are a common sight in rural Thailand. A project undertaken recently, aims at converting this waste into energy. Using biogas technology, the Solar Energy and Training Centre (sert) of Naresuan University in Thailand, is using this waste to procure biogas for basic rural energy requirements, …
Developed as an alternative to manual harvesting in small plots, the stripper-gatherer (sg) is a boon to farmers, particularly in Asia. Designed at the International Rice Research Institute in Philippines, it can harvest, thresh and clean about four tonnes of grain a day. Its simple stripper rotor, the teeth of …
A solar fruit-and-grain drying system has been developed by the Farm Machinery Institute at Islamabad, Pakistan, for better conservation of fruits and vegetables. The new drying system contains eight identical flat-plate solar collectors with a total surface area of 15 square metres. These are used to achieve a drying capacity …
