-IPS News SUNDARBANS, India- When the gentle clucking grows louder, 50-year-old Sukomal Mandal calls out to his wife, who is busy grinding ingredients for a fish curry. She gets up to thrust leafy green stalks through the netting of a coop and two-dozen shiny hens rush forward for lunch. In the Sundarbans, where the sea is slowly swallowing up the land, Mandal's half-hectare farm is an oasis of prosperity. The elderly couple resides...
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350-tonne oil spill by Bangladeshi ship threatens Sunderbans -Krishnendu Mukherjee & Rakhi Chakrabarty
-The Times of India KOLKATA: The fragile Sundarbans region stared at an ecological nightmare after a vessel carrying 350 tonnes of oil crashed, spilling the toxic liquid over an 80-sq-km area along the Sela river in Bangladesh and threatening a sanctuary of rare Irrawaddy and Ganges dolphins. The site, near Mongla port, is about 100km from the Kolkata port and Indian officials are on alert over the possibility of the oil slick...
More »Smart agriculture for food security -Rita Sharma
-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's budget speech has promised a hundred smart cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...
More »Women on the Edge of Land and Life -Manipadma Jena
-IPS News SUNDARBANS: November is the cruelest month for landless families in the Indian Sundarbans, the largest single block of tidal mangrove forest in the world lying primarily in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. There is little agricultural wage-work to be found, and the village moneylender's loan remains unpaid, its interest mounting. The paddy harvest is a month away, pushing rice prices to an annual high. For those like Namita Bera,...
More »Sunderbans' water getting toxic: Scientists -Sahana Ghosh
-IANS Kolkata: Climate change is causing toxic metals trapped in the sediment beds of the Hooghly estuary in the Indian Sunderbans to leach out into the water system due to changes in ocean chemistry, say scientists, warning of potential human health hazards. They predict that after about 30 years, increasing ocean acidification - another dark side of spiked atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide - could in fact unlock the entire stock of...
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