A NAGPUR Bench of the Bombay High Court has stalled the transfer of toxic waste from Bhopal to Maharashtra amid protests by residents and activists. The decision comes a week after the Jabalpur Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court ordered that 350 tonnes of the hazardous material lying at …
Over a year ago, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) undertook an exercise to assess pollution levels in some of the highly polluted industrial areas of India. It then released a list of 43 most polluted areas, terming them critically polluted, and imposed a moratorium on their expansion. …
WITH dwindling natural gas and oil reserves, the world is increasingly looking for alternative sources of energy. Industry people say shale gas is one promising option. It is the natural gas trapped in shale, a type of flaky sedimentary rock. It already accounts for 22 per cent of USA’s gas …
People in the villages around Ratlam are paying a heavy price for living near the industrial town in Madhya Pradesh. Their groundwater has been polluted by over 23,500 tonnes of hazardous waste dumped at two factory premises and other sites in Ratlam. The quantity of toxic waste lying at the …
JUST before the Kerala Assembly was dissolved for elections, the state’s Left Democratic Front government passed a law to secure compensation for people affected by Coca-Cola’s bottling operations at Plachimada in Palakkad district. The law, passed unopposed on February 24, provides for a three-member tribunal which will adjudicate on claims …
The Supreme Court today issued notices to the Union Carbide Corporation, Dow Chemicals and others on a Centre's plea seeking increase in compensation to the victims of 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy from Rs 750 crore to Rs 7,700 crore. A five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S H Kapadia also …
The new nutrient-based fertiliser subsidy policy provides implicit incentives to farmers to test soil samples regularly and get crop-wise recommended doses of nutrients, and offers prospective benefits from the agro-environmental management point of view. A study of six villages in the lower Bhavani Basin in Tamil Nadu reveals that despite …
The Union Carbide India Ltd (UCIL) factory at Bhopal, abandoned after the world’s worst industrial disaster that took place on December 3, 1984, is still heavily contaminated with a range of persistent pollutants. From this study it can be concluded that even after 25 years the residents of the area …
Sevagram ashram in Maharashtra where Mahatma Gandhi spent many years of his life is threatened by pollution. Effluents from a pig iron plant are flowing in the drain passing through the ashram complex in Wardha district and have contaminated the groundwater. Villagers have stopped using the well in the ashram, …
Luck plays in strange ways. I was reaching for my scooter when the telephone rang in my office-cum-residence in Bhopal. I opened the gate, unlocked the door downstairs, ran up the steps to the first floor and opened the door to my apartment. Normally the caller would have given up, …
There is 1.1 million tonnes of highly contaminated soil at the plant site, according to an estimate by the National Environment Engineering and Research Institute (NEERI) in Nagpur. It needs to be treated and safely disposed of. The report said up to two metres of soil will need to be …
This report presents the details of proposed action plan for the abatement of pollution in the industrial clusters of Ludhiana. The action plan has been evolved based on the studies of present environmental conditions, key hotspots, industrial activities, condition of pollution control measures for treatment and disposal of solid waste, …
For more than 25 years, the Union Carbide (UCIL) factory has been contaminating the land and water of Bhopal. Latest tests show that groundwater in areas even three km away from the factory contains almost 40 times more pesticides than Indian standards.
The Madras High Court has directed the State government to take appropriate steps to remove all the encroachments on Pallikaranai marshland under the Tamil Nadu Land Encroachment Act. The first bench comprising Chief Justice A P Shah and Justice Prabha Sridevan, which gave the direction while passing orders on the …
THE Coca-Cola company and its CEO, Mr Neville Isdell, must be congratulated for some excellent public relations work lately, and in particular, in India. Neville Isdell was the "guest editor' of ET(March 17, 2008) and he used the platform to pull off a wonderful public relations coup
The government will launch a pilot project on the public-private partnership basis for improving the public transport system of Karachi in June this year. The Senate Standing Committee on the Environment was informed on Thursday that the project would focus on plying CNG buses in the provincial metropolis. Expressing its …
Mormugao Deputy Collector Levinson Martins has convened a meeting on Thursday morning, to discuss the seepage of petroleum products into two wells at Bogmalo. Stating this, Chicolna-Bogmalo Sarpanch Laxman Kavlekar told Herald that Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) officials on Wednesday claimed they had no facilities to store the petroleum that …
Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, is blessed with rivers. But what's the use? Each and every river and canal is filled with poisonous muck which seeps into groundwater. The Janhit Foundation in Meerut has carried out several studies which show that Uttar Pradesh's groundwater is loaded with dangerous carcinogenic chemicals. …
Unsafe for consumption: Samples of contaminated water drawn from well at a house in Sai Nagar in Thoraipakkam. Dumping of garbage in the heart of the Pallikaranai Marshland (Perungudi Dumping Yard in official parlance) and letting out of untreated sewage from different sources into the Buckingham Canal have resulted in …
The erratic and heavy rainfall last year has turned a large part of the deep desert country into a vast submerged landscape. Barmer District, Thar Desert, Rajasthan has an average rainfall of 280 mm annually, but during the monsoon of 2006 it received about 600 mm of rain within 2
