Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of Tapeshwar Singh Bhati Vs State of Rajasthan through the Principal Secretary, Tourism dated 03/02/2023. Grievance in the application was against apprehended damage to the environment by proposed activities during ‘Maru Mahotsav 2023’ at Jaisalmer from February 2 to 5, 2023. …
For years researchers have marvelled at the phenomenon of singing sands. Marcel Leach and Douglas Goldsack at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada have discovered that for sands to sing, they need to be coated with a layer of silica gel. After examining various types of sands they found that the …
with the advent of the 21st century, it has become increasingly clear that drylands of the world will be subjected to even greater land use pressures as a result of the continued population growth. This is because the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems is particularly sensitive to the impact of …
MOST deserts of the world are extensive grasslands with scattered shrubs but they sustain relatively a low density of trees. Due to harsh climatic conditions, scanty natural resources and scarcity of drinking water, the deserts are thinly populated by humans. However, a wide variety of wild animals, well adapted to …
ERITREA has taken the international community by surprise in its refusal to accept foreign aid. Having broken away from Ethiopia, a country infamous for droughts and famine, it is resolved in avoiding reliance on foreign aid and has adopted a policy of sustainable development. This determination to build on the …
FROM the state of Gujarat comes one of the more recent examples of innovation in desert reclamation. A private industrial house (the Benzer group) has successfully reclaimed a large chunk of saline wasteland in Bhachau district of Kutch using halophytes, flora which grow in saline habitats. ,The word 'Indian desert' …
A simple and low-cost system has been devised in UK for restoring deserts. Called 'LandCover', the system is a growing medium based on a matrix that is an ultra water absorber and re-establishes agricultural growth on barren, sterile land. The matrix consists of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and other agrochemicals in …
Farming in desert, and that too fish farming, would seem an impossible task to most. But a team of enterprising farmers led by Yitzhak Levy has developed a super intensive technique to produce yields which are not only profitable but also much higher than those of fish ponds in favourable …
This book offers a collection of 39 papers on the various research activities of scientists of the Central Arid Zone Research Institute, (CAZRI), Jodhpur, working in Rajasthan's arid zone. The book first deals with the natural resources inventory, and later goes on to describe the various researches being carried out …
STARK mountainous desert areas need no longer wear dead white. The possibility of reclaiming areas like Ladakh and Lahaul and Spiti has materialised in the form of a tree called the seabuckthorn. Tenacious as a mountain goat, the shrub-tree is a blessing for the region: it checks soil erosion, yields …
Largescale planting of trees in deserts for fodder and fuel wood have always come a cropper since a continuous supply of water is never assured. Now, scientists from the Jodhpur-based Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI) have invented a device called Jaltripti to surmount this problem. Jaltripti consists of a …
AMIDST the euphoric atmosphere, a time bomb is ticking away in semi-arid West Asia. On September 13, Israel signed the Declaration of Principles with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and followed it up, in less than 24 hours, with the signing of the Common Agenda with Jordan. Though this has …
GEOLOGISTS have found traces of a river that flowed between 5,000 and 11,000 years ago in the desert expanse of the Arabian peninsula. Some stretches of the river may have been as wide as 5 km wide, says Farouk El-Baz, director of Boston University's remote sensing centre (New Scientist, April …
The silver ant -- Cataglyphis bombycina -- is the undertaker of the Sahara desert -- a role it has been forced to adopt because of its own body limitations and because of a small lurking, desert lizard that loves to gobble them alive. Rudiger Wehner of Zurich University began a …
Pushkar, near Ajmer, Rajasthan, lies in the dry zone to the east of the Indian desert. In the vicinity there is evidence for three arid phases, during the latter part of the Pleistocene, each represented by a major sand sheet and fossil desert dunes. The earliest contains lenses of detritus …
