Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of News Item titled "2 killed in blast at illegal cracker unit in Thanjavur appearing in The Hindu dated 19.05.2025". The application is registered suo-motu on the basis of the news item titled 2 killed in blast at illegal cracker unit …
tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa's decision to resuscitate the 14.85-megawatt Perungudi waste-to-energy (wte) plant has been greeted with dismay by environmentalists. On January 31, 2003 the state government cleared the project. This was preceded by a presentation made by Energy Developments (edl) Private Limited, the company promoting the plant, …
In the face of mounting protests against the Comprehensive Wasteland Development Project (cwdp), the characteristically intractable chief minister (cm) of Tamil Nadu (tn), J Jayalalithaa, has been forced to climb down partially. The state government's ambitious programme has been in the eye of a storm ever since it was conceived …
a survey currently underway in states to calculate the number of below poverty line (bpl) households is being opposed tooth and nail by civil society groups under the 'right to food' campaign. They are objecting to the exercise on two counts: firstly, the criteria used for poverty estimation are incorrect; …
at a time when the Pulse polio immunisation drive is in full swing, rumours are rife about the presence of polio virus in some goats in Gumbli village in Tamil Nadu's Thiruvellur district. Experts fear this can affect the already floundering national polio eradication programme. According to news reports, around …
Managing a village commons is difficult. But just imagine managing urban waste as a common property resource. This is exactly what the common effluent treatment plants (cetps) aim to do. Collect the waste of individual units from an industrial estate and treat it in a common location. Members
#1 Who is the polluter? What is their waste-typology? This is the first critical and often make-or-break step. Get the property rights regime wrong and it is clear that nothing will work, is the advice of common property managers in rural areas. It is the same for a cetp. Delhi …
If cetps are the answer, how do we make them work? The choice of technology, however important, is not the only challenge ahead. The key is to build a much stronger framework for common waste governance. In Delhi, for instance, a legal framework exists. But it is so convoluted that …
Pollution from small-scale industries has grown by leaps and bounds. So, building common effluent treatment plants (cetps) has become a fashion. The Union ministry of environment and forests (mef) has instructed state pollution control boards to set up cetps in industrial estates. Central assistance of 25 per cent is given, …
In clearing the tenth five-year plan recently, the Union cabinet gave the green light to a programme that seeks to metamorphose the leather industry into an environment-friendly sector. While the tanning process will no longer cause pollution, leather itself would become a comple tely biodegradable product if this plan is …
this year too, Diwali turned out to be a smoggy affair in Delhi. Pollution monitoring by the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) showed that the level of respirable suspended particulate matter (rspm) doubled from 432 microgrammes per cubic metre (
When Karnataka chief minister (cm) S M Krishna was asked to disclose his "strategy' for resolving the raging Cauvery river dispute with Tamil Nadu (tn), he wrung his hands and said: "The only panacea is rainfall.' While Krishna lobbed the ball in "Nature's court', his tn counterpart
Why is everything important reduced to a dramatic farce in our country? Take the Cauvery imbroglio. The issue is serious and important. Namely how will states, regions and people share increasingly scarce water resources? What can we do to maximise water availability? But what do we have instead: an unseemly …
the European Union's authority for applying precautionary principle in environmental and health decision-making has been recently reinforced by two rulings of the European Court of Justice. Both cases arose from a 1999 regulation banning use of four antibiotics in animal feed. Two pharmaceutical firms had challenged the regulation arguing that …
In a first-of-its-kind venture, a one-megawatt (mw) Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plant is being established off the Tuticorin coast in Tamil Nadu. The project, being undertaken by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), seeks to convert thermal energy from the ocean into electricity. To produce this energy, the …
STAKEHOLDERS IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT John M Riley . Published by Sage Publications . New Delhi . 2002 . 214 pages The state-sponsored development has been a failure. Therefore, a closer collaboration between the public and private sectors is the need of the hour. The book talks about the type of …
The prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) is increasing in urban India. Overweight in adolescence is a marker of overweight in adult age, and it shows an association with the above diseases. There have been meagre data from India on the prevalence of childhood obesity. The objective …
battlelines are drawn over the setting up of a polyvinyl chloride (pvc) plant at Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu. While environmentalists and local residents are pitted against the project promoter, the state authorities are yet to make their stand clear on the issue. The plant, being set up by Chennai-based Chemplast …