Judgment of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of Raghubir Singh Garia Vs State of Uttarakhand & Others dated 22/04/2025. The matter related to illegal mining of soap stone in village Papon, District Bageshwar, Uttarakhand. The complainant, a resident of the village said that illegal mining of soap stone …
Concepts of environmental conservation and management are directly linked to the practice of development. Development has been seen as not only an instrument to increase production, but also to remove poverty. But anti-poverty schemes in India have not been sustainable and are conditioned by the kind of finance available for …
It has been a year since Anil Agarwal, the founder editor of Down To Earth, passed away. We remember him every moment. We work as his proxies. We work his dreams; they have become ours, too. His ideas changed many around the world. He changed the way we think. But …
Every period of his life was a new chapter of discovery. Anil never let us, even for one moment, feel that we were less powerful This is the most difficult article I have ever written, without my colleague Anil Agarwal and about my colleague Anil Agarwal. Anil and I have …
The us President George Bush's obdurate stance on climate change has driven negotiations under the critical un Framework Convention on Climate Change (unfccc) to a feverish pitch. The world has now two options - convolute the climate treaty to meet us demands (including one that countries like China and India …
High levels of ‘ecological poverty’ – defined as the lack of a healthy natural resource which is essential for human society’s survival and development – are a key cause of the economic poverty of the world’s rural poor. Conversely, healthy lands and ecosystems, when used sustainably, can provide all the …
Situated in the heart of the once proud and prosperous Malwa Plateau, the rapidly growing city of Indore, buffetted by the waters of the Narmada, is today facing an acute water crisis. The municipality cannot supply enough water and the groundwater table is falling, and whatever there is of groundwater …
Last week, us president and oilman George Bush made his first statement on global warming, which has shocked environmentalists and European governments. But what we must realise is that his position, howsoever Neanderthal, is well calculated, strategic and frankly no different from the earlier us administration. Writing a letter to …
If you saw tv programmes or read newspapers on the latest budget, you would have thought it is only for business leaders. The manner in which business editors and columnists went overboard to seek the response of the corporate community to Yashwant Sinha's latest hat-trick of budgetary numbers shows a …
In the face of mounting pressure from the media and civil society, the Kerala government has appointed an expert committee to investigate the unusual diseases in Padre, a village in Kasaragod district, Kerala. The village has a number of people suffering from diseases of the central nervous system, which, believe …
I am indeed grateful to Coromandel Fertilisers Ltd for giving me an award instituted in the name of Norman Borlaug, an eminent scientist whose work has played a key role in improving India's food security. It is particularly a great honour for me to receive the award from the hands …
My colleague and I write a regular column for a business daily in New Delhi. It was some time back that we wrote an article on the health impacts of diesel in the same daily only to receive a legal notice to the tune of Rs 100 crore from TELCO, …
There is no dearth of scientific knowledge in our country, but it does not get built into our daily lives Disasters come and go, they are just temporary in nature, but our governance has become a permanent disaster. India is a country blessed with one natural disaster after another. If …
It was very strange indeed. Nuclear babus at an environment meeting. During the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol - the legally binding protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions - in The Hague recently, one issue, among others, that would constantly hold up progress was nuclear power. And every time the …
Just a small story in the Business Standard about Europe, but with big implications. The story says that the European Commission has asked the European Court of Justice to approve a fine of us $159,000 per day on Britain for not cleaning up its dirty beaches. That amounts to about …
India's politicians never seem to think ahead. They have created three new states out of some of the poorest regions of India - Uttaranchal, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand - without any idea of how would these states survive economically without a huge and permanent largesse from the Centre. If the new …
The latest environmental fix in Delhi, once again under the pressure of the Supreme Court, is the relocation of polluting industries situated in the areas that are in non-conformity with the city's Master Plan. Four years went by without the government taking any serious action and now that the court …
just whom would you vote for as the greatest Gandhian in the Indian sub-continent of the post-Independence era? Our vote will unhesitatingly go to the Pakistani social scientist Akhtar Hameed Khan, in whose memory social activists from all over Pakistan met on October 12, 2000, his first death anniversary in …
smack! A pie in the face of Frank Loy, the leader of the us delegation to the conference on climate change in the Hague. A young British girl threw the organisers into a tizzy, and immediately the civil society became a security risk. A Bangla-deshi non-governmental organisation ( ngo ) …
british politicians are facing one disaster after another but the way they are facing them should be a lesson for the tribe that exists in India. As in our country, the high fuel prices have become a source of major contention and with fuel blockades being threatened there is panic …
