After creating a huge controversy by claiming that foreign patients who were treated in India developed antibiotic resistance, authors of the superbug New Delhi metallo-B-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) bacteria study published in the United Kingdom-based medical journal The Lancet now say that poor sanitation and unregulated antibiotic use presented an immense challenge and should be of great concern to the Indian health authorities and the World Health Organisation. Responding to queries in the...

Seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have plunged into a government effort to clean the Ganga, promising to recommend a slew of river management and technology strategies to improve its ecological health. The 2500km Ganga is one of the country’s most polluted rivers laced with sewage and city waste although the government has spent about Rs 900 crore over the past two decades on a clean-up plan initiated in the late-1980s. An...

Pollution contents were 300 to 1,000 per cent more than the norms The Gujarat Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, a voluntary organisation working for environmental protection, has come out with startling facts on how the badly treated industrial effluents are being dumped in the major rivers in the State and in the sea. The rivers include the Narmada, Mahisagar, Sabamarti and Damanganga and the sea outlet is in the Gulf of Cambay. Samiti convener...

With 130-140 million Indians likely to move to cities in the next decade and an equal number in the one after that, the development of urban India represents the biggest challenge you can think of -- in the next two decades, India will have to create as many new cities as it created in the last several hundred years. Alternately, the existing cities which are home to around 285 million people...

Diehard devotees may not believe this. But it's true that the water of the holiest among holy rivers -- the Ganga -- fails to meet the drinking and bathing standards after it leaves Garhmukteshwar and is most polluted in Kanpur. The national river meets all three standard parameters -- Bio-Oxygen Demand (BOD), Dissolved Oxygen and total coliform -- only at Rishikesh. For a river water to be fit for bathing...