Reply filed by the Director, Environment-cum-Special Secretary, Forest, Environment and Climate Change Department, Odisha and Member Secretary, Odisha Coastal Zone Management Authority, May 1, 2025. NGT, had registered suo motu in response to the news item in the Hindu, May 4, 2024 titled "Swell waves likely to strike coastal areas …
WATER is priced far too cheaply in India to prompt industrialists into conserving or recycling it, says a detailed study prepared by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) for the Ganga Project Directorate. But the government has let the NIPFP recommendations lie in its cupboards. The study …
PAPER mills can substantially reduce their water consumption if they were charged a higher price for the water they use, says a detailed water audit conducted by the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices (BICP). In 1989, the pulp and paper industry had an annual installed capacity of 3.354 million …
MADRAS Refineries Ltd (MRL) will soon be a zero-effluent company. Situated in Manali, on the outskirts of water-starved Madras, MRL plans to treat its waste water and pump it back for circulation in its cooling towers. The Madras city corporation, which is extremely short of water, has placed restrictions on …
SINCE 1991, the Balotra municipality has been levying a tax of Rs 15 for every bale of cloth coming into the town for processing and dyeing. The levy was started by the State Pollution Control Board (SPCB) on complaints by farmers downstream about groundwater pollution and will be used to …
• Entrepreneurs should be encouraged to set up separate companies that will operate common effluent treatment plants. While the companies would be paid for effluent treatment, their income would be exempt from tax, which would help them upgrade their technology and become more efficient. The companies could undertake not to …
CHARGES: Charges are a "price" polluters must pay for using environmental services. They increase costs of production for polluting industries. Various types of charges are: • Effluent charges are levied based on the quantity and/or quality of effluents discharged into the environment. • User charges are payments for collective effluent …
It does not matter whether the assumptions made by the Tata Energy Research Institute are accurate or whether they will hold true. What matters is that TERI"s predictions of the country"s energy situation are grim -- and require urgent attention. If energy use in India is not rationalised and made …
For officials in the power sector, setting targets for electricity generation has become a leap in the dark. Because of environmental considerations, all targets for producing power from conventional sources have been upset and several hurdles have been placed in the way of securing international assistance for power projects. Prime …
DURING the first 20 years of evolving environmental policy, the name of the game was pollution control. However, this remained very much a game of the North because the South's game was development. The Brundtland Commission came up with an elegant compromise: sustainable development. And, it has proved a challenge …
THE traditional gharat (water wheel) has caught the technologist's eye and deceptively simple modifications to its design have made it at least 40 per cent more efficient and also enlarged its capability so that it can power several machines simultaneously. The gharat, in use for centuries in the Himalayan region, …
IT WAS no mean task to iron out differences to get an agreement on the atmosphere chapter in Agenda 21, the whole of which was bracketed at the last prepcom by Yemen on behalf of the Arab group. As the use of oil was singled out as one of the …
"ECONOMICS is the science of studying people's behaviour in their ordinary day-to-day life." That is how undergraduate textbooks define the subject. The book under review, however, talks about an economic revolution. But it is not clear who this revolution is being waged against. After reading the book, one learns that …
A 10-mw power plant based on rice straw, the first of its kind in the world, will'become operational in Jal Kheri village in Patiala district of Punjab in November this year. The plant will work on a very effective method of converting waste into electricity, according to M C Upreti …
It's time the green brigade joins the banker-bashing, Occupy Wall Street movement Another climate summit and another potential disappointment facing the green brigade. Even before it officially kick-starts, there is a widespread feeling that the Durban Summit is expected to be another brick in the collapsing climate wall. The reason …
It was half past four in the evening when we reached Garbadhar. It took us about 4 hours and two flat tyres along the Kali river from Dharachulha to get there. The Border Roads Organization remained inactive that day as it was a Sunday. Otherwise, as we were told and …
Less than a kilometer from Asia's largest Solar Termal plant, west of Bikaner, Rajasthan, lives the farmer Sabhu Khan. His hamlet is still unreached by the grid. Instead of the grid connection, he decided to go for an off-grid solar system – He bought it himself, at full market price …
