-The Hindu The devastating landslips were caused by the undercutting of fragile hillsides for highways rather than by dams, which actually helped mitigate the floods The natural calamity of June 16 through 19 that devastated the whole of Uttarakhand and large areas of Himachal Pradesh and western Uttar Pradesh - an area of almost 20,000 sq.km. - was one of extremely rare severity among all the hydro-meteorological disasters to have struck India. Intense...

-The Hindu     Questions being raised about possible floods in downstream areas Dehradun: The level in the Tehri dam in Uttarakhand on Sunday reached 818.50 metres against the permissible mark of 825 metres, Tehri District Magistrate Nitesh Kumar Jha told The Hindu. According to Northern Regional Load Despatch Centre (NRLDC) data, the level rose by 8 metres since August 1. Mr. Jha said that for the past three to four days the inflow was around...

-The Hindu Dehradun: "I am the only one left in the family now," says Vasundhara Devi, 32, whose husband and two sons are among those who have gone missing in the Kedarnath floods in June and are now ‘presumed dead'. Poonam Tewari, whose husband Suresh owned a restaurant in Kedarnath, says, "I only have a three-year-old daughter for a family now. I need money to educate her." Sarita Bagwadi's father and two...

-The Times of India Almost 57 years after it was carved out by merging Telugu-speaking areas and cutting out Marathi and Kannada speaking areas, Andhra Pradesh is now on the carving board again - the Telangana region will now be partitioned off into a new state, induced by a long-standing agitation, but delivered by the political expediency of the Congress. Whatever be the complex electoral implications of this, the real question is...

-The Hindu Kathmandu: Greater cooperation is necessary to protect the fragile ecology of the Himalayas, the world's youngest mountains facing unprecedented human encroachment, concluded the team of Nepali and Indian journalists and researchers that gathered in Kathmandu on Monday to assess the disaster brought by the floods last month. The programme, titled "Ganga-Mahakali catchment disaster" was organised by the Nainital-based People's Association for Himalaya Area Research (Pahar) and the Kathmandu-based Himal Southasian...