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 …
IN A PROGRAMME conducted by the Academy for Development of Science in Karjat in Maharashtra, farmers all over the country collected some 365 local varieties of rice in as many days. As many as 325 of these were not documented in the 60,000-long official list of the rice plant (Oryza …
BIRD-WATCHERS, studying the mating habits of different species since the early 1970s, are discovering that faithlessness is common and most birds fancy a romp outside their nest. The cuckoo's waywardness is well-known, but this is so even among birds hitherto thought to be monogamous, such as the guillemot (Uria aalgae), …
MANY varieties of crops in the higher Himalaya are rapidly disappearing, resulting in an alarming decrease in crop diversity in the Garhwal Himalaya, according to scientists at the G B Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development. The Garhwal Himalaya is a repository of many lesser-known and unexploited crops, but …
TECHNOLOGY is opening up the world of computers to the blind, everyday activity such as feeding oneself to the spastic and movement to the physically handicapped. A number of government and research organisations are investing ingenuity, time and funds in developing aids for the handicapped. But commercial organisations are lagging …
THE EARTH summiteers who assembled at Rio in June this year have gone back to their respective countries. The hard preparatory work, the almost endless discussions to reach a consensus and the excitement of an earth summit are all over. One talks of a lull before a storm; but there …
WHEN SLIGHTLY built Saif Ali, 22, looks out from his home in Choti Nahar, on the outskirts of Pathankot on the highway to Gurdaspur, he sees the blue-grey hills of the Dhauladhar range in the distance. It's not just physical distance that separates him from the mountains, it's a whole …
That concerned citizens have the right to approach the courts on matters of social justice and that India's constitution, by implication, guarantees ecological justice are indeed ideas that have done India's judiciary proud. They have greatly strengthened democracy in the country and, over the years, public interest litigation has become …
In this issue, we carry two reports: One on the subject of human rights suppression and environmental degradation, and the other on trade bans against environmentally harmful products. Both trade and human rights are being used today as sticks to beat the South. Northern NGOs have repeatedly raised these issues …
HAVING an attractive, alliterative title is a prerequisite for popular books today, but it is Arthur Bonner"s subtitle that is seriously misleading. Averting the Apocalypse is not about "social movements in India today". Rather, it is about a particular subset of activists connected with them -- the educated upper-middle class, …
The pollen so sharp that the wind sneezed, its belly so speckled with rashes that it turned visible. The way the fish walked up the beaches you'd think they had turned amphibian. The fisherfolk came out, hollering; as the women tenderly pushed them back in the sea saying "they are …
THE FIRST Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was set up at Kharagpur in 1952. Since then, around 37,000 B Tech graduates have passed out of this and the four other IITs in Kanpur, Delhi, Bombay and Madras. The estimated annual income and expenditure of these five institutions are about Rs …
AFTER all these years, Subhas Mukhopadhyay must be used to taking awards in his stride. Long before prizes and awards came his way (starting with the Sahitya Akademi award that he won in 1964), those of us who knew Subhasda in the 1940s remember him as a soft-spoken communist poet. …
The Rules provide for the application to the Central Zoo Authority in order of being granted recognition as a zoo in India, the classification of zoos on the basis of acreage, number of animal and varieties, and number of visitors per year. Provisions are made on animal health, hygiene, feeding …
IN PLACES like Uttar Kannada, M D Subhash Chandran, a botanist from the Dr Baliga College of Arts and Sciences, Kumta, in Karnataka, claims that the ban on shifting cultivation was largely motivated by the need to release labour for the new plantations that were coming up in the area. …
HISTORY is generally seen as a record of kings, queens and warriors. But it could as well be a record of changing human-nature interactions over time. All human societies have exploited their environment for their survival and economic growth. Sometimes this exploitation has been destructive -- for instance, the Mesopotamian …
IN THE small workshops of Purani Mandi in Saharanpur, woodcarvers fret, fit and polish their carvings for a revitalised urban market in India and abroad. Their own future, however, is precarious. Spiralling prices of fast-depleting raw materials and a market controlled by middlemen threaten to choke this once thriving trade. …
THREE YEARS after the National Wasteland Development Board (NWDB) launched the "Greening the Himalaya" project in the Jadhera panchayat of Himachal Pradesh, the balding hills of the panchayat are turning green once more. But this achievement is not so much due to the NWDB as because of the villagers of …
The curtain shrouding the Indo-Russian rocket deal seems to be lifting at last with U R Rao, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), reiterating recently that the deal was "very much on". Work on developing the engine jointly is proceeding on schedule and India has "made the initial …
The Hindi proverb that derides the enfeebled mind as one with "worms in the brain", is no longer a literary expression. A study involving 159 worm-infected Jamaican children between 9 and 12, showed that removing moderate to heavy amounts of worms from children led to a significant memory improvement, in …
HELPED along with generous grants from the World Bank and Japan to green the Aravallis, plus its own sizeable forestry budget, the Rajasthan government has embarked on an ambitious compensatory reafforestation plan. District collectors have been asked to identify areas which can be set aside to form part of a …
