The global cost of disasters is growing: The economic burden of disasters is intensifying. While the direct costs of disasters averaged $70–80 billion a year between 1970 and 2000, between 2001 and 2020 these annual costs grew significantly to $180–200 billion. But the real cost is far higher. Disaster costs …
The monitoring and management of the Indian coastline has come under sharp focus after the tsunami disaster. There is now a strong demand to implement the Coastal Regulatory Zone (crz) notification of 1991. Let us look at why protecting coastal ecology is so critical. Natural protectors, such as sand dunes …
The Indian ocean covers 73,556,000 sq km, or 20 per cent of the world’s surface. Aspects like oceanography, geophysical phenomena, undersea exploration and economic and military uses have a bearing on ocean behaviour. How cognisant are our experts with this large water body? Other than isolated research programmes associated with …
It would be naive to assume that disasters will stop. We cannot change the nature of disasters. What we can change, certainly control, is the scale that a disaster wreaks. This is precisely what disaster preparedness
Scientists believe that the Sumatra earthquake made the earth wobble on its axis and permanently accelerated the Earth's rotation, shortening a day by a fraction of second and permanently altering the regional map. The devastating undersea earthquake off Sumatra in Indonesia has brought about some striking changes in the Indian …
Disasters are not predictable. They follow no standard operating procedures. Disaster preparedness is about managing the unknown, not a science but a social behaviour that’s responsive, predictive and imaginative.• Effective disaster management depends on four factors: • Preparedness: knowing where and when disaster will hit • Mitigation: through measures like …
Please act: The Supreme Court issued a notice to the Union government on January 3, 2004, in response to a petition by the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) that seeks a thorough examination of the contents of soft drinks. The petition points out that despite extensive research proving that …
Even as relief work continues in areas devastated by the tsunami, the corpus of the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund has quietly swelled to around Rs 500 crore. The money is said to be the largest corpus ever collected through the fund. This is just money that has been sent …
Searching through the rubble of his home for anything still whole, Laksmiah Poleh can see life's options quite clearly. He can give up and move his family back to their home state on the mainland and, if he's lucky, find work as a tenant farmer making Rs 1,700 a month. …
The archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar islands consists of 572 islands; 35 are known to be inhabited. These are home to five tribes. The Jarawas, Sentinelese and Onges are Negrito tribes. The Andamanese have ceased to be a tribe and a pure-blood Andamanese is a rarity. The remaining two …
On January 4, the government announced that 901 people died and 6,010 were missing in the tsunami that hit Andaman and Nicobar islands on December 26. That cannot even be a half-truth. Samir Acharya, secretary of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, said that according to four Nicobarese tribal …
sanjib kumar roy Port Blair the andaman and Nicobar islands face a severe pollution threat from foreign trawlers that intrude into Indian waters and are apprehended by the country's security forces. The Indian Navy and the Coast Guards seize at least two such vessels every month. Most of these belong …
saving the act: The prime minister's office (PMO) has issued a directive that Union cabinet proposals having a bearing on decentralisation will have to be cleared by the newly-formed ministry of panchayati raj affairs, along with other ministries concerned. This is to ensure that ministries do not make parallel implementation …
environmentalists and non-governmental organisations (ngo) of Andaman and Nicobar Islands are up in arms against a move by the Central Agricultural Research Institute (cari), Port Blair, to introduce a molluscicide targeting the African giant snails (Achatina fulica). They fear that since most pesticides are not host specific, the new molluscicide …
the uncertainty regarding the fate of the Jarawas, the endangered tribe living in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has increased. During a recent meeting, the concerned authorities failed to evolve a consensus on the closure of certain parts of Andaman Trunk Road (atr), which cuts through the Jarawa Reserve. The …
Discovery and validation of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome is an active area of interest, because of their usefulness in evolutionary and disease-association studies. The researchers have resequenced 70 chromosomes from the Jarawa, a Negrito tribal group inhabiting the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago for a = 10 …
can feral goats actually survive on seawater? This is the crux of a controversy embroiling the ruminant that inhabits the volcanic Barren Island, situated 135 kilometres from Andaman and Nicobar Islands' capital Port Blair. Even as research conducted by the Central Agricultural Research Institute (cari) suggests that the animal consumes …
prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's recent announcement in Bangkok that Andaman and Nicobar Islands' capital Port Blair would be twinned with Thailand's tourist haven Phuket was greeted by protests in the union territory (ut). It is apprehended that any association with Phuket, which is said to be a sex tourism …
the very outsiders for whom forests were cleared to enable them to settle in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, are now being expected to play a pivotal role in protecting the union territory's (ut) rapidly receding green cover. The ut is set to adopt the Joint Forest Management (jfm) programme …
left high and dry due to rampant sand mining, the tribal people of the Car Nicobar region of Andaman and Nicobar Islands have asked the local administration to clamp down on the activity immediately. The extraction continues unabated in spite of a May 7, 2002, Supreme Court (sc) directive stipulating …
is the Andaman Works Department (awd) an expert body on eco-tourism? It will, in the near future, monitor the construction of hotels and resorts on hectares of as-yet unspoilt beaches in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The union territory plans to open its ecologically and culturally fragile areas to
