As I write this my city Delhi is drowning. It started raining early this morning and within a few hours the city has come to a standstill. The television is showing scenes of traffic snarled up for hours, roads waterlogged and people and vehicles sunk deep in water and muck. The meteorological department records that some 60 mm of rain has fallen in just about 6 hours; 90 mm in 24...

Boommi Gowda used to fear the night. Her vision fogged by glaucoma, she could not see by just the dim glow of a kerosene lamp, so she avoided going outside where king cobras slithered freely and tigers carried off neighborhood dogs. But things have changed at Gowda's home in the remote southern village of Nada. A solar-powered lamp pours white light across the front of the mud-walled hut she shares with...

-Outlook   The secret behind the Ganga’s ability to self-rejuvenate its waters continues to elude discovery In 2009, when C.S. Nautiyal, now the director of Lucknow’s National Botanical Research Institute, spiked a fresh Ganga water sample with an infectious strain of Escherichia coli to test the Ganga’s reported self-healing qualities, he found that the bacteria lasted no longer than three days. He repeated the experiment with a 16-year-old sample of Ganga...

Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra chairperson Avdhash Kaushal lashed out at the government on Wednesday for flawed policies that had retarded the development process in Uttarakhand in the name of environment conservation and made life miserable for both humans and wildlife. “There is an urgent need to change the Forest Conservation Act and Wild Life Protection Act which are colonial in nature and are also creating problems for people of Uttarakhand,”...

The downstream impact of dams in the Brahmaputra river basin has been a major issue of concern in recent years in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh (AP), even as plans unfold to develop at least 135 large hydropower projects to produce approximately 57,000 MW of electricity in AP alone. The past three months have seen major developments on the issue. Both an Expert Committee of Academics and a House Committee of...