The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says. J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years. He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims. Leading glaciologists say the...

The World Bank has agreed to loan India $1bn (£600m) over the next five years to clean up the Ganges, one of the most polluted Rivers in the world. The 2,500km (1,500 mile) river has been badly polluted by industrial chemicals, farm pesticides and other sewage. Speaking in Delhi, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said the clean up would target the entire river network. Plans involve building sewage treatment plants, revamping...

The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it...

It does seem that Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh chose an inopportune time — the eve of the crucial UN climate negotiations — to endorse the findings by a retired scientist that Himalayan glaciers have not been ‘retreating’ any faster than they have been for the past century. The study by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, has apparently not been peer-reviewed. No less...