-Al Jazeera   Floods triggered by rains in north of country have left 120 dead, besides stranding thousands of Hindu pilgrims. Monsoon flooding in northern India has claimed more than 120 lives, stranding thousands of people due to high water levels and landslides, officials say. Torrential rain and landslides since Sunday have stranded pilgrims at four revered Hindu shrines, washed away bridges and roads and caused other damage in Uttrakhand province. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh...

-IANS Shimla: The hydropower projects in Himachal Pradesh -- in private and public sectors -- are not only gobbling up forests but also damaging natural resources, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has found. The compensatory afforestation by the state is highly deficient as 58 percent of the test-checked hydropower projects reported no afforestation at all, the CAG said in its recent report. It pointed out that lack of re-greening of...

-The Telegraph Illegal hunting in Arunachal Pradesh primarily for meat on the table or for money from the market may be threatening several protected or rare wildlife species, a survey in the state's Ziro Valley has indicated. Researchers from the Wildlife Institute of India, (WII) Dehradun, have documented hunting of leopards, marbled cats, black bears, orange-bellied squirrels, among other species, mainly for meat, skin, and commercial sales in six villages of Ziro...

-The Times of India Last year's unusually dry summer and this winter's unprecedented snowfall, the worst in nearly 50 years, in Ladakh's Changtang area has claimed over 18,000 "pashmina" goats, the source of one of the finest varieties of wool that has put the region on the world map. Changtang is a high altitude plateau in southeastern Ladakh, inhabited by Changpa (Champa) nomads, and known for its harsh and semi-arid weather with...

-The Guardian By shunning all but organic farming techniques, the Himalayan state will cement its status as a paradigm of sustainability Bhutan plans to become the first country in the world to turn its agriculture completely organic, banning the sales of pesticides and herbicides and relying on its own animals and farm waste for fertilisers. But rather than accept that this will mean farmers of the small Himalayan kingdom of 1.2 million people...