The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
Confidence has many faces. In Ambedkar Colony in Kanyakumari district, women have secured a pukka road, electricity, water and a cremation ground. Pushpa, the panchayat president, says her task has just begun. "I want to build an overhead tank, a library, get bus facility to my village,' she says determinedly. …
In November 1999 during the World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Seattle I led the delegation from the United Kingdom. I was convinced the expansion of world trade could bring major benefits to developing countries and would be a key to tackle world poverty. For this, developing countries needed to …
The 1980s and early 1990s were a time, the world over, of increasingly stereotypical confrontations between industry and environmentalists. Ecological considerations formed no part of industrial productive strategies, argued environmentalists. Industry treated the ecosystem as a vast self-replenishing raw material procurement facility, and as a convenient dumping site. Nonsense, thundered …
Ineptly. One word that describes the way Indian industry produces and gobbles energy. And because it is inept, it gobbles more than what is necessary. The end result: more pollution. This, in essence, is the problem with the use of energy in India. Total energy consumption in India is climbing …
The case of India's agro-based pulp and paper mills is representative of most small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in the country: low on resources, low on motivation to turn clean, and therefore, low on efficient, non-polluting technology. Numbering about 300, these mills together produce about one-third (2.0 million tonnes) …
India's 2,500 tanneries churn out 1.8 billion square feet of leather every year. They earn the country US $6 billion annually as foreign exchange. They also discharge about 24 million cubic metres of wastewater with high COD, BOD and TDS concentrations, and about 0.4 million tonnes of hazardous solid wastes …
Modern agriculture: the boon and the bane of India’s teeming millions. The boon, because it has ensured that the nation’s crop fields remain fecund. The bane, because it has bred a poison that is seeping into our veins through the food we eat and the water we drink. Every day. …
Based on its environmental performance, Indian industry can be classified into two groups. The first consists of companies where management limits itself to worrying about how to stick to (or use to the full) standards and norms. The second consists of companies that have gone beyond
Currently, industry guzzles about 22 per cent of the total freshwater used worldwide. By 2025, this figure is expected to go up to 24 per cent, says the World Bank’s World Water Development Report 2001. In India, of all the categories of water use, industrial water use is rising the …
at the recently held meeting of the 11th Commission on Sustainable Development (csd-11), a roadmap was charted to monitor the progress of commitments made during last year's World Summit on Sustainable Development (wssd) in Johannesburg, South Africa. The csd-11's meet took place at the un headquarters in the us, from …
Tourism...handicrafts...agriculture...forests... lakes - Jammu & Kashmir's (j&k;) basis of survival for ages. They still constitute 98 per cent of the state's economy and sustain 90 per cent of its population. Kashmir's economy is nothing but a sensitive and organised use of its ecology. After 15 years of living under the …
status: Most of the major lakes are dying potential: Just three lakes provide economic sustenance for close to 500 villages strategy: Revive these water bodies to generate livelihood Over a mile above sea level, around the Wular Lake, a few of India’s once richest villages are fighting a losing battle …
status: Almost no tourism; crafts trade only Rs 900 crore potential: Eco- and religious tourism can generate Rs 1,000 crore revenue, while handicrafts can turn in Rs 3,500 crore strategy: Revive confidence by reviving governance Some 1,400 empty, rotting houseboats ringing the Dal Lake provide mute testimony to tourism and …
As an economy, reviving Kashmir is not a difficult proposition. The new government, instead of exploring the more difficult option of sourcing resources from outside, has to look inwards. It has to bring about a basic change in the state's policy: from that of dependence to self-dependence. While the government
status: Five per cent of the state's forests are degrading every year potential: Regeneration of the degraded forests can create 120 million humandays of employment strategy: Open up the forests to people and involve them in regeneration and management with benefits A 150-year-old deodar tree
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
Rows of human hands hanging on inside claustrophobic buses, trams and metros…Bodies packed like sardines, jostling against each other...Tempers at breaking point. And outside, more chaos - thousands of cars, jeeps, vans, two-wheelers, three-wheelers…all groaning through a choking haze of pollution in interminable traffic jams that test one"s patience and …
How is India responding to the crisis? In March 2003, the finance minister of Delhi, delivering his budget speech, promised more money so that the capital could become, as its chief minister has put it, "the flyover city of Asia". Think more road; give vehicles more space: this grand, now …
