-The New York Times AGIRIPALLI: In this belt of villages near the fertile Krishna River delta, much is as it has been for generations: The cotton soil is as black, the mango trees as heavy with fruit, the tobacco fields as fragrant and deeply green as ever. But there have been curious changes in recent months. An old temple has received an expensive renovation, complete with a new banquet hall, courtesy of...
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Centre's rush to clear industrial projects will impact environment -Darryl D’Monte
-The Hindustan Times The entire framework for monitoring environmental compliance is being dismantled systematically. This is a process that actually began with the UPA government, which replaced the feisty environment minister Jairam Ramesh with the more pliant Jayanthi Natarajan. With industry lobbies still crying wolf, she too made way for Veerappa Moily, the petroleum and natural gas minister, without the UPA seeing anything contradictory in someone holding both those responsibilities. In just a month,...
More »The good is in the detail -S Gurumurthy
-The Hindu The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...
More »Building collapses kill seven people in India daily, NCRB data show -Christin Mathew Philip
-The Times of India CHENNAI: An average of seven people die in building collapses in the country every day, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics. More than 20 people were killed in two different building collapses in New Delhi and Chennai on Saturday. In 2012, a total of 2,682 people died and 850 people were injured in 2,764 accident cases across the country, according to the NCRB data. Uttar Pradesh recorded the...
More »A year later, no lessons learnt -Kavita Upadhyay
-The Hindu Uttarakhand is still in dire need of a development plan that is also sensitive to the fragile ecosystem that was crippled by the floods and landslides of 2013 Santosh Naudiyal stood on the verandah of a building in Rudraprayag last December while he narrated his story. On October 1, 1994, the night of the Rampur Tiraha massacre, Santosh and his friends boarded a bus to New Delhi to participate in...
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