-Down to Earth Several initiatives are demonstrating how the informal e-waste recycling sector can be formalised Savita Devi (name changed), a municipal solid waste worker in Ahmedabad city, used to earn Rs 1,500 per month. When she joined an initiative of GIZ India in 2012, where she was trained to collect e-waste, her income rose to Rs 2,500 per month. “We are now able to hire private tutors to educate our children,”...

-The Hindu Chennai: Completely unprepared for disasters: the hospitals in Chennai — private as well as government — were particularly vulnerable, improvising solutions as the situation developed. As water levels rose, Chennai saw every single system associated with modern life abysmally fail —houses collapsed, roads caved in, communication networks went down, sewage pipelines were wrecked, and carcasses floated on roads. Patients in government and private hospitals across the city took a beating. Completely...

As Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh fight the fury of flood caused by annual northeast monsoon, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the natural disaster in Uttarakhand, which took place in June 2013, has been made available in the public domain recently. The CAG report discloses how various development activities in the state flouted guidelines issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Expert Committee on glaciers...

-The Indian Express All the extra money that you spent on installing CFL lights in your homes, in buying new LED television sets, and on five-star rated air-conditioners and refrigerators instead of three-star ones, have proved to be worthwhile, having resulted in huge energy savings for India in the last decade. Between 2000 and 2011, a total of 791 million tonnes of oil equivalent energy was saved, thanks to measures like...

-The Business Standard Four sub missions have been merged into one scheme - agri extension, seed and planting material, agri mechanisation and plant protection and plant quarantine   Mumbai: The ministry of agriculture has introduced an umbrella scheme to augment agricultural extension and technology activities with the objective of improving the supply of the agricultural commodities from the grass root level. According to official sources, the impetus on agricultural extension has to go hand...