In 2023, the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) recorded a total of 399 disasters related to natural hazards. These events resulted in 86,473 fatalities and affected 93.1 million people. The economic losses amounted to US$202.7 billion. The 2023 earthquake in Türkiye and the Syrian Arab Republic was the most catastrophic event …
The paanwallah -doubling-up-as-a-condom-vendor ad has been taken off the air. Instead, Doordarshan (dd) will show a village council member warning women about aids and exhorting them to be faithful. The shift in focus heralds a drastic change in India's aids prevention policy. No longer condom-centric. Harping on abstinence and fidelity. …
The prevalence of gallbladder cancer, the commonest biliary malignancy, shows geographical and racial variations. It is reported to be rare in India. However, the incidence of gallbladder cancer in north and central India is very high—it is the commonest gastrointestinal cancer in women. Even Indian migrants to different countries have …
• Undernourished population of sub-Saharan Africa will go up by 2015 in stark contrast with other developing countries • 168 million people were under nourished in sub-Saharan Africa in 1990/92 (three-year average), and will increase to 205 million by 2015 • Developing countries as a whole had 815 million undernourished …
Every year Indian thermal power plants (TPPs) spew out 100 million tonnes of flyash, a grey outpour soon expected to reach 175 million tonnes. According to current estimates nearly one lakh hectares (ha) of land in India is taken up by ash ponds. Bad news for the environment. For, most …
Ineptly. One word that describes the way Indian industry produces and gobbles energy. And because it is inept, it gobbles more than what is necessary. The end result: more pollution. This, in essence, is the problem with the use of energy in India. Total energy consumption in India is climbing …
The case of India's agro-based pulp and paper mills is representative of most small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in the country: low on resources, low on motivation to turn clean, and therefore, low on efficient, non-polluting technology. Numbering about 300, these mills together produce about one-third (2.0 million tonnes) …
India's 2,500 tanneries churn out 1.8 billion square feet of leather every year. They earn the country US $6 billion annually as foreign exchange. They also discharge about 24 million cubic metres of wastewater with high COD, BOD and TDS concentrations, and about 0.4 million tonnes of hazardous solid wastes …
Modern agriculture: the boon and the bane of India’s teeming millions. The boon, because it has ensured that the nation’s crop fields remain fecund. The bane, because it has bred a poison that is seeping into our veins through the food we eat and the water we drink. Every day. …
Based on its environmental performance, Indian industry can be classified into two groups. The first consists of companies where management limits itself to worrying about how to stick to (or use to the full) standards and norms. The second consists of companies that have gone beyond
India's drought-stricken people must weather more uncertainty. Indeed outright confusion, for the country could receive anything from 113 per cent excess rainfall to 25 percent below normal rainfall, if monsoon forecasting models are to be believed. Such science can only leave mouths dry. On the eve of the 2003 monsoon, …
Currently, industry guzzles about 22 per cent of the total freshwater used worldwide. By 2025, this figure is expected to go up to 24 per cent, says the World Bank’s World Water Development Report 2001. In India, of all the categories of water use, industrial water use is rising the …
The 1980s and early 1990s were a time, the world over, of increasingly stereotypical confrontations between industry and environmentalists. Ecological considerations formed no part of industrial productive strategies, argued environmentalists. Industry treated the ecosystem as a vast self-replenishing raw material procurement facility, and as a convenient dumping site. Nonsense, thundered …
Fifty per cent of India’s dams are concentrated in Maharashtra, but only 17 per cent of the agricultural land in the state gets irrigated. The irrigation department (id) presides over an unwieldy irrigation system that is in a state of acute disrepair. And, the government of Maharashtra (gom) has been …
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The export of fish and fish products from India is not a post-Independence phenomenon. Fish export statistics are available from mid-nineteenth century onwards. Princely states like Travancore and Cochin had vibrant export trade. Dried fish and prawns, fish oil, shark fins, sea cucumber, fishmeal
"Tonight I am proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles,' declared us President George Bush in his State of the Union Address to the congress in January 2003. The announcement is just one among a spate of recent developments …
