The overpowering stench of municipal waste hits one hard on entering Boragaon. Women and children from the nearby squatter’s colony squabble over the garbage unloaded by trucks from Guwahati, the sprawling business hub of northeastern India and a million-plus city of Assam. A sole adjutant stork, an endangered bird, meditates …
Guwahati, the sprawling million plus city of north eastern India has grown at the cost of vital wetlands. While the rich legally bought the water-bodies, the poor ‘illegally’ encroached on them. With major storm water basins in the city disappearing, every monsoon, Guwahati reels under flashfloods. The June 22 police …
Just a few days before Swami Nigamanand died while on a fast to protest state-sponsored sand mining and stone crushing along the Ganga near Haridwar, the Uttarakhand government ordered a ban on mining activities in the region considered sacred. Millions of pilgrims visit the place to take a dip in …
SOIL erosion worldwide is threatening agriculture. A group of scientists has calculated that about 7.5 per cent of the soil in India is extremely vulnerable to erosion. Scientists at the Central Soil and Water Conservation Research and Training Institute in Dehradun employed a concept to evaluate susceptibility of soil types …
IT IS back to square one for the farmers of Jalaun district in Uttar Pradesh. Reeling under persistent drought from 2003-08, they were driven to mentha (mint) cultivation that promised good returns. Instead, it increased debts. Cultivation of this water-intensive crop is fast shrinking due to depletion of groundwater and …
SOIL constantly undergoes changes—be it by growing crops, adding fertilizer, erosion or contamination. Scientists analyse as many as 50 properties of soil—including sand and organic carbon content, porosity and essential nutrients like nitrogen and iron—to monitor its health and predict if the land is on the verge of degradation by …
THE Great Indian Desert, Thar, is expanding, swallowing and degrading about 12,000 hectares of productive land every year. An alarmed Rajasthan government recently asked the state pollution control board to suggest how to arrest the land degradation and soil erosion. The board reviewed about 200 research papers on the impact …
Why is the river so notorious? Assam has lost about 170,000 hectares to the Brahmaputra and its major tributaries between 1990 and 2007. These are mostly prime land such as tea gardens and the economic loss is phenomenal. The problem is the Brahmaputra transports heavy sediment load—about 800 million tonnes …
US $1 TRILLION WORTH OF MINERALS Afghanistan is suddenly richThe Pentagon recently announced that Afghanistan is sitting on mineral wealth worth US $1 trillion—about 1,000 times the government’s annual revenue. The untapped mineral deposits, including iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium, a key raw material for laptop, cell phone and …
The governments of the Himalayan hill-states and the international donor agencies have consistently advocated disbursal of funds for improvement of road connectivity in keeping with the mandates of a
Increased erosion associated with the rise of the world's great mountain ranges has been held to be the cause of a prolonged episode of past climate cooling. That connection is now brought into doubt.
The comparative assessment of morphologic runoff and annual silt load from micro-watersheds can help in establishing relationships between these parameters with objectives of controlling runoff, conservation of soil, reduction of reservoir silt load and enhanced groundwater resources in the micro-watersheds. The automated watershed delineation technique using the filled digital elevation …
Climate and its variability have been and continues to be the principal source of exceptional fluctuations which wreaked havoc on forests. In Chamba, up to an elevation of 1,800 m chir pine (Pinus roxburghii Sargent) is the main naturally occurring coniferous tree in forests. Plantations of Chir pine are also …
Free-ranging horses (Equus caballus) in North America are considered to be feral animals since they are descendents of non-native domestic horses introduced to the continent. We conducted a study in a southern California desert to understand how feral horse movements and horse feces impacted this arid ecosystem. We evaluated five …
A number of perennial springs such as Thakurani, Khandadhar, Gudguda, Gonasika and Bolani are present in the hilly tract of Joda-Badbil-Koira area of Keonjhar-Sundargarh District, Orissa. The area is densely forested with rich deposits of Fe and Mn, which are mined using the opencast method of mining. (Correspondence) Original Source
In an almost unprecedented development, xatradhikars of 13 xatras (neo-Vaishnavite monasteries) based here today sat on a mass demonstration at Kamalabari Ferry Ghat to draw the attention of the Government towards the need for the permanent protection of the river island under the threat of erosion. The three-hour sit-in demonstration …
Four Calcutta High Court judges today heard appeals for damages by 1,550 victims of erosion by the Ganga, creating "history' for the Lok Adalat. Thousands of people who lost their land, livelihood and homes to erosion in the past two decades thronged the court, at Malda College. The hearing, due …
The very existence of Deepor Beel is under threat as some anti-social groups are busy encroaching its areas and illegally cutting the soil of the wetland. The efforts of the government and other nature-loving organisations for eco-tourism development of the Beel, situated on the western side of Guwahati, have failed …
Asom Water Resources Minister Bharat Chandra Narah informed the State Assembly today that Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh would take stock of erosion and other problems afflicting Majuli by paying a visit to the river island in the first half of April. The Brahmaputra Board and the Water Resources Department …
In a bid to boost the production of bamboo, considered to be an important cash crop, the National Bamboo Mission is training about 30 farmers of Golaghat, Sivasagar and Jorhat districts at composite training centre here. The three-day training underway at the centre is being conducted by resource persons of …
