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 …
ROY, Tisdell and Sen"s book on economic development and the environment is certainly timely, having come out only months before the June UNCED summit at Rio. Interest in the subject is therefore at its peak. The book sounds a much needed warning about the environmental cost of economic development and …
SATYAJIT Ray"s formidable body of work has given both-form and substance to the cultural landscape of the nation and, thereby, helped shape its cultural consciousness. The range is astonishing: from period pieces like Charulata and Jalsaghar to films with a rural setting like Pather Panchali and Sadgati, to works like …
THE Banihal Valley in Jammu's Pirp.anjal range, which separates the Jammu region from the Kashmir Valley, appears like an oasis amid barren hills. This area, 2,000 m above sea level, which was until recently totally denuded, is now green with fruit trees and vegetable patches. The transformation is due to …
ABOUT 60 km from the historical town of Bijapur is a latter-day human-made wonder - the Chikka- padasalagi barrage. This half-km long dam on the River Krishna is testimony to the collective will and undaunted efforts of the people from 21 villages around the Jamkhandi taluk of Karnataka's Bijapur district. …
USA, Japan and the European Community have together pledged a total of US $75 million to the establishment of an International Science and Technology Centre in Moscow which will provide stable employment to scientists in the erstwhile USSR. That this is primarily a bid to scotch the likelihood of these …
Act 1 (18 April): Yeltsin suspends rocket technology transfer to India following the threat of sanctions by USA. Act 11 (26 April): Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao assures Parliament that the contract has neither been suspended nor cancelled even as U R Rao, chairperson of the Space Commission, returns …
A 10-mw power plant based on rice straw, the first of its kind in the world, will'become operational in Jal Kheri village in Patiala district of Punjab in November this year. The plant will work on a very effective method of converting waste into electricity, according to M C Upreti …
THE Ukraine government has, six years after the disaster, officially admitted that between 6,000 and 8,000 people died as a direct result of the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor number 4 on April 26, 1986. Former deputy chief engineer Anatoli Stepanovich Dyatlov, who was in charge of reactor number …
FEARS of ozone layer depletion have inspired research into refrigeration technologies that do not depend on ozone-destroying chemicals and which may even be more efficient than the conventional coolants. The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Postgraduate School at California,. USA, have jointly developed thermoacoustic devices that chill nitrogen …
THE Indian silkworm is likely to become rather superior - once scientists at the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore are successful in their application of a method developed recently by them in isolating and transferring specific genes. The low-yielding but sturdy Bombyx mori (mulberry silk-worm) will remain sturdy, of …
A trick that Nature rarely performs is homeosis - the substitution of one body part by another. A team of zoologists at Utkal University, led by Prof Priyambada Mohanty-Hejmadi, became part of one such display when they discovered that even vertebrates can exhibit homeosis, which earlier was thought to be …
SHOPPING can now be as mindless as' you'd like it to be - the smart shopper can opt for the smart trolley. It directsr,@-Idvises, locates, tempts, and c&n; even draw up a menu. Videocart Incorporated, a Chicago-based company in USA, has developed a small liquid crystal display screen which can …
TWO resident families in California's Beverly Hills, which houses many Hollywood stars, were recently fined US $1.2 million for cutting down a neighbour's trees to get a view. The Views Wars, the ultimate in upperclass environmentalism, is resulting in view-mongers being dragged into court, and several US towns have passed …
Honey bee THIS honeycomb is at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. The worker bee is Anil Gupta, a professor at the institute who specialises in socio-ecological studies of communities living in dry areas. His product is a publication called Honey Bee: an informal newsletter for documentation and experimentation …
NEARLY eight weeks after the March 14 fire that damaged a portion of the Nagarhole National Park and Reserve Forest -Asia's largest deciduous forest - the debate is on as to what happened on that day and the week thereafter and how much damage was actually done. On that day …
THE Himalayan yew Taxus baccata is in the news. Researchers at the University of Kansas have found that the yew contains the anti-cancer drug, taxol, in sufficient quantities for it to replace its cousin, the Pacific yew. Indian botanists fear that the graceful tree may become gradually extinct. American researchers …
RABINDRANATH Tagore's much loved tree, the scholar's tree or Alstonia scholaris, is today a bone of contention within the faculty of the Indian Institute of Technology (11T) in Kanpur. Last year, when about 10 Alstonia trees were felled on the campus after several staff members complained of asthma attacks, it …
RULERS, universally, create beliefs to justify their rule. The British, certainly, were convinced that the lazy, hungry Indians were incapable of ruling them- selves. In this book, Famines, David Arnold, a British historian working at the London School of Oriental and African studies, has placed the subject of famines on …
Over 2,500 hectares (ha) of forests in Kerala have been destroyed by fires this summer. Fires are reported to have destroyed extensive acreage in several of the 14 sanctuaries and national parks in the state, including 250 ha in the Erakivulam National Park, 500 ha in the Thakkady Wildlife Sanctuary …
FOR the first time ever humans have grabbed a peep-hole into the birth of the universe about 15 billion years ago. Since the Big Bang theory was first mooted in 1964, scientists have found it difficult to explain how the universe acquired its lumpy character, that is, its stars, planets …
