The Bikaner Development Authority Bill, 2025, passed by the Rajasthan Assembly, aims to establish a Bikaner Development Authority to regulate development activities in the Bikaner district. The bill was passed by voice vote, with the opposition Congress walking out of the House due to insufficient discussion. The bill was introduced …
• 1992 was the year of environment. More than 100 heads of state and government gathered at Rio to discuss the health of the planet. But the conference refusea to look at underlying issues -lack of global democracy at one level and local democracy on the other -that favour exploitative …
APRIL 1992: The Finnish government decides to slash its development budget from 0.76 per cent of its GNP in 1991 to 0.4 per cent for the period 1991--95. JUNE 1992: In Rio, Finnish foreign minister Paavo Vayrynen says, "We fully share the view that all developed countries should reach the …
INDIA'S entire geography has been covered by aerial photography, but development agencies and town planners cannot use the data because of national security regulations. "Even archival maps are not easily available to researchers," complains Majid Husain, head of the geography department at the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. Participants …
CALCUTTA maidan -- at 294-ha, the largest public ground in the teeming metropolis, is in danger of being developed as commercial property by the Indian army. The maidan belongs to the army's eastern command which has its headquarters in the adjoining Fort William estate. The move, prompted by the army's …
CRITICISING or condemning lopsided developmental priorities and highlighting their consequences is one thing; outright rejection of the very concept of development, science and technology is quite another. Propagating extremist ideology -- one that goes to the meaningless extent of rejecting even the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- is the sum …
SAUL Bellow, in one of his novels, The Dean's December, anticipates the transformation of American cities into vast urban ghettoes teeming with people who are unable to cope with the jungle law of modern civilisation. These are the people whom he calls the "unwanted and dispensable population", who, like Jews …
YET ANOTHER World Bank-funded dam project is under fire. The Visthapiti Mukti Vahini (VMV) has challenged the rehabilitation of people displaced by the Chandil dam on the Suvarnarekha river in Bihar, in the Supreme Court. The VMV holds that a decade after the initiation of the land acquisition proceedings, rehabilitation …
IN A RADICAL departure from earlier policy, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) will now look beyond the Hindu Kush region and establish links to study other mountain regions of the world. This is in line with its strategic plan for the 1990s, titled "Towards 2000", which also …
IF ONE were to pick a single product to represent the tremendous technological progress in the second half of this century, it would certainly be the computer. In few fields has progress been so dramatic, so sustained and so significant. Popular opinion has it that computers came to India with …
MOST OF the world believes industry can only harm the environment, Stephen Schmidheiny disagrees and in Changing Course, he explains why. The main theme of his book is that governments and industry can cooperate to preserve the environment, or at least not harm it. The argument, for which one has …
THOUGH the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development was finally accepted unanimously, Tommy Koh of Singapore, chairperson of UNCED's main committee, had to resort to a lot of jugglery to effect the compromise in the face of repeated threats from the US and other delegations. The Rio declaration is a …
• Human beings are at the centre of sustainable development. •States have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources. • The right to development must be so fulfilled as to meet the needs of present and future generations. • Poverty eradication is an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. • …
IN JUNE 1972, I was in Stockholm, at the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In June 1992, I was in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Environment and Development. What was the difference? Rio was bigger. In Stockholm, every meeting was within ten minutes' walking distance. Except, …
THE RECENT environmental carnival at Rio was an extremely enlightening and educative experience for me being, perhaps, the largest gathering of NGOs, on the one hand, and that of heads of governments, on the other. There were essentially two parallel events which took place in the first half of June …
ON APRIL 21, 1992, an angry mob on Devar Island in Goa destroyed a bulldozer owned by the Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd (KRC). On the same day, Claude Alvares, a noted Goan journalist, along with other members of the Goa Foundation, a voluntary organisation, moved the Maharashtra high court to …
DEVELOPMENT has two sides, as Sudipto Sarkar of the People United for Better Living in Calcutta told the Calcutta High Court recently. The court is hearing a case against the proposed reclamation of eastern Calcutta's wetlands. The voluntary agency informed the court that the West Bengal government's idea to develop …
PATRICIA ADAMS attributes the current environmental imbroglio of developing countries to their debt crisis, which has been aggravated by loose lending, corruption and anti-democratic policies. She unearths various links between borrowing, lending and "development" projects to expose the mercantilism of Third World development. She does this by asking simple questions …
TWENTY years after the women of UP's Chamoli district hugged trees to save them from contractors' axes, the echoes of the call "Chipko" still ring in the district's hills. With new challenges to be met, the women's fight to preserve the Himalayan ecology continues. The Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal, which …
ADVANCE copies of the World Bank's prestigious World Development Report, 1992, duly printed on recycled paper, focusses on development and environment this year. It came bound with a paper seal bearing the words, "Embargo until May 18". The report, taken in its entirety, is truly an embargo on greening the …
