Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of Ramdevbhai Samatbhai Sanjva Vs State of Gujarat & Others dated 09/05/2025. The matter related to remedial actions to be taken for abatement of pollution of river Bhadar near Ahmedabad. Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) has filed the response affidavit, March …
Till September 1994, plague was s 'upposedly a forgotten disease in India. It caught the country's medics aghast at their own ignorance. But after its outbreak, medical authorities have taken to pointing out that they had never claimed the disease had been eradicated from the country. The bacterium which causes …
Although the plague was thought to have been sent packing in 1966, isolated suspected cases have since been reported, the most recent being from Him Pradesh in 1984. Besides, since 1989, the NICD's Bangalore-based Pla Surveillance Unit has been rattling off outbreak predictions - all of them binned. Serum tests …
The plague caught institutions everywhere completely inert. Only the Plague Surveillance Unit (PSU) in Bangalore - the last of its kind in the country - and its sub-unit at Kolar in Karnataka, were active during the 190s. Delhi's National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) had the only group of epidemiologists …
In the wake of the plague came the clamour for plague-beating drugs, particularly tetracycline. Says Prabir Biswas, director (marketing) of the Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Ltd (IDPL), "When all hell broke loose, we had a stock of 4.8 million capsules ready." IDPL's Hrishikesh and Hyderabad plants functioned 24 hours a …
ONE of India's most outstanding economic jewels has lost its glitter. All that Surat could do is wait weak-kneed and groggy for a Pied Piper to slough off its gigantic army of rats and bandicoots, which recently sent the world's most dreaded disease rustling insidiously through India. One of the …
IF WE are to believe K K Seth's declamations on Prosopis chilensis , it is a perfect Dracula of a weed, devilishly draining an already gasping Rann of Kutch of life-giving water (see Down to Earth, August 31, 1994). But actual facts point in quite a different direction. There is …
The Union minister for environment and forests, Kamal Nath, has allowed the de-reservation of 10,900 ha of forest land in Gujarat's Kheda, Panchmahal and Vadodara districts. He has also said that a proposal to regularise encroachments on another 39,750 ha in the state would be cleared by August 25. The …
THROUGH the '80s, Vadodara was known as much for being one of India's fastest-industrialising cities as for its mountainous garbage problem. But the Baroda Citizen's Council (BCC), a local voluntary body, is taking care of the latter. The BCC programme to involve residential colonies in cleaning up their own household …
The Little Rann of Kutch is under attack from the Gujarat forest department, which is merrily planting a weed that is sucking the area of its juices. The history of the Little Rann tells us that before the '50s, sweet water could be found at a depth of 6 metres. …
AS GUJARAT gears up to face another summer of water riots in the cities, the farmers of Shankerpura village in Panchmahal district will continue to irrigate their fields: they have their lift irrigation systems, run collectively and set up with help from the Sadguru Water and Development Foundation (SWDF). Shankerpura …
COMMUNITY participation in constructing and managing check dams and the use of water through lift irrigation has transformed the local ecosystem of 37 tribal villages in the Vansda taluk of Gujarat"s Valsad district. Cropping patterns, incomes, employment and even the social system have undergone remarkable changes. The villagers are now …
ON NEW Year's Eve, 1991, newspersons covering the 2-week Sangharsh Yatra from Madhya Pradesh to Gujarat against the Sardar Sarovar project (SSP) witnessed an ominous phenomenon: an area under prohibitory orders changing its contours like an amoeba. The Gujarat police stopped the yatra at the interstate border in Ferkuva village, …
Ya apo divya uta va sravanti khanitrima uta va yah svayamjah samudrartha yah suchayah pavakasta apo deviriha mamavantu Apah Suktam, Rigveda, VII. 59.2 "May the waters that are in the sky, or those that flow (on the earth), those (whose channels) have been dug,* or those that have sprung up …
THIS is a pond with a difference -- a lifeless, bitter-with-salt body of water that gets hotter as you go deeper and is scalding at the bottom. But for the Kutch dairy in Bhuj, Gujarat, the 6,000 sq metre pond is a gargantuan trap for solar energy and heats about …
THE "do nothing" principle of natural farming has resulted in bounteous harvests for Bhaskar Save, whose 14-acre farm, Kalpavruksha, is located in Deheri village in Gujarat"s Valsad district. Three decades ago, Save abandoned chemical fertilisers, pesticides and heavy machinery. "Minimum interference with growth is called natural farming," says Save. "Trees …
Pro-Narmada dam activists in Gujarat have succeeded in forcing a fact finding team appointed by Union ministry of environment and forest (MEF) to put off its visit to the dam site. The NBA felt that what would be just another project review was not required. The team was to find …
ONCE upon a time, the beautiful blackbuck (Antelope cervicapra) lorded over the Velavadar National Park in Gujarat. But in the early '80s, the blackbuck's territorial sovereignty was challenged by a formidable enemy -- the wolf (Canis lupus pallipes). Earlier, the wolves had been casual visitors to the park; the past …
The battle to raise hopes and lower the heightTHIS is the kind of demagoguery that haunts the Sardar Sarovar Project. The late Gujarat Chief Minister, Chimanbhai Patel, had used the emotive words jeevan dori (lifeline) to cement the project on an emotional platform from which, with infinite political cunning, it …
THE NARMADA Control Authority (NCA) - a body controlling all aspects of the utilisation of Narmada waters - has restrained the Gujarat government from closing the sluice gates of the Sardar Sarovar dam until the three states involved in the project clearly state their rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R;) plans. The …
PASTORALISTS are a vanishing breed the world over. These herders of sheep and cattle have a key role to play in the rehabilitation and sustainable management of fragile ecosystems. India has 34 million pastoralists managing a livestock population of more than 50 million. Apart from producing milk, meat, leather and …
