The Environment and Forests Ministry was in news throughout 2010 -- be it for Vedanta Resources, Posco and Lavasa -- or for Jairam Ramesh's aggressive green activism. While the ministry rejected the green signal to Vedanta for its $1.7 billion project to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa noting that the company violated the environment and forests rules, it put the $12 billion project by South Korean steelmaker Posco...

The people adversely affected by the Tarapur Atomic Power Station today said they would revive their agitation against the project and meet villagers protesting a nuclear plant at Jaitapur to create awareness about the dark side of the project. The announcement came days before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s scheduled visit to Tarapur to inaugurate a nuclear reprocessing facility. “The government has offered a higher compensation package to the local residents affected by...

Even as the media celebrate the Mercedes Benz deal in the Marathwada region as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the latest data show that 17,368 farmers killed themselves in the year of the “resurgence.” When businessmen from Aurangabad in the backward Marathwada region bought 150 Mercedes Benz luxury cars worth Rs. 65 crore at one go in October, it grabbed media attention. The top public sector bank, State Bank of India,...

Have the Cancun Agreements set Kyoto Protocol on a path to eventual death? No. Killing Kyoto would require a 2/3rd vote by the 180-plus member countries. There is too much guilt involved in that. But the Agreements have prepared the ground to render the Protocol hollow and meaningless - left to survive a vegetative, inconsequential life even as a new and unequal global regime takes ground. The Kyoto Protocol was...

In a jaw-dropping move, the Uttar Pradesh government has converted 2,367 sq km of the countryside along the Yamuna Expressway, connecting Greater Noida with Agra , into urban land. In a country where policy to create new towns has not ventured beyond the 50 sq km allowed as the maximum area of a Special Economic Zone, this is welcome. But not so, the manner in which the changed land-use is going...