Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of News Item titled "Containers from sunken ship likely to drift towards Alappuzha, Kollam Coasts in 48 hours: INCOIS" appearing in The Hindu dated 25.05.2025 dated 27/05/2025. The original application was registered suo-motu on the basis of the news item titled …
Urban dwellers spend 80 per cent to 90 per cent of their time indoors in an environment that is dangerous to their health, according to Cui Jiusi, a Beijing environmental scientist. Cui, director of the Air Quality Monitoring Laboratory under the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, recently cited health dangers …
Do not throw away those old telephone books and fruit juice packs, build your walls with them. Australia's national research centre, CSIRO, is backing a project to turn these "raw' ingredients into flat panels and mouldings that would normally be made of wood. CSIRO claims that the mix of paper …
materials which change their properties under different conditions are every designer's dream. From simple quartz crystals to heat-sensing devices, a list of their potential uses can run into hundreds of pages. In the past, a lot of effort went into designing materials that can become transparent or reflective as desired. …
DLF, a real estate and construction company based in New Delhi, has developed cellular lightweight concrete, an eco-friendly product that offers a more cost-effective alternative to bricks. K P Singh, chairperson and managing director, DLF, said that the new product not only saves the topsoil, which gets eroded during the …
Coconut shells and ash could soon compete for becoming the new age building materials. A breakthrough by researchers from the Brazil-based Technological Research Institute involves the use of these two materials to promote low-cost housing ( IDRC Report , Vol 23, No 4). Says Vahan Agopyan, the brain behind the …
The informed environmentalist will find it difficult to agree with the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) decision to ban the use of wood in its buildings and -- defying all ecological logic -- substitute mineral products for it. The implicit assumptions in this decision are that the use of wood …
THERE is a resurgence of interest among urban builders in mud, the traditional construction material of rural India, and many government housing schemes are adopting itMud's low cost and easy availablity, compared with conventional building material, make it a viable construction option for the poor. Other appreciate its malliability, good …
Union urban development minister Sheila Kaul has presented Laurie Baker, the innovative architect lauded for his low-cost construction techniques, with the United Nations Habitat Scroll of Honour for 1992. The award was presented to him on World Habitat Day (October 5). Baker has a simple rule-of-thumb for deciding which material …
MUD IS a versatile building material that has been used to make some extraordinary architectural marvels -- from 1,000-year-old ksars (forts) in Morocco and 6,000-year-old arches, vaults and domes in the Nile Valley to multi-storeyed houses of adobe, sun-baked bricks of mud and straw, which is the traditional building material …
IN 1988 the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) allotted 2.1 ha of land in Nand Nagri in east Delhi to the Mud Village Society (MVS) to build a model colony of environment-friendly mud-houses. However, the project seems to have run into rough weather and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has …
AMIT MITRA A LARGE number of the over 700 mud houses built by the Karnataka Housing Board (KHB) at Yelahanka near Bangalore are showing signs of falling apart. This is a major setback to a project that described by V Suresh, a HUDCO director who was then KHB chairman, once …
MUD IS no longer inferior. As a building material, it can be strengthened and stabilised to function as a viable alternative to concrete and steel. Traditional mud-building methods include mixing specified quantities of rice husk, cow dung or lime with raw earth. One of the oldest techniques is the wattle- …
ARCHITECTS hoped to establish mud as a viable building medium when they set out to build the country's first major environmentally-sound building. The mud headquarters in Delhi of Development Alternatives (DA) headquarters was built to prove a point, recalls Shrashtant Patara, a DA architect. "It was one of the first …
S GOPIKRISHNA WARRIER IN 1976, the biogas lab of the Centre for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA) was constructed on the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) campus in Bangalore with unique building blocks. They were not conventional kiln-fired bricks but stabilised mud blocks. Fourteen years …
THE GOVERNMENT is learning to lead by example. Its largest construction agency, the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), has decided that the use of wood in its housing projects will be banned from April 1993. The urban development secretary, Raj Bhargava, points to the paradox of the government borrowing for …
The slowdown has dragged down home real estate prices across India but has the meltdown been worse in larger cities than Tier 2 cities? And what lies ahead for India's Tier 2 towns especially now with the government pushing for affordable homes. In this segment, we focus on key Tier …
Development is the real casualty after the Supreme Court clamped down on construction activity in three states including Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The blanket ban, which is the result of the states' failure to implement solid waste management systems, will bring to grinding halt construction activities, dealing a body …
