-The Indian Express It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators...
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Behind hydel project washed away, a troubled trail to accident in 2011 -Jay Mazoomdaar
-The Indian Express “Imagine the odds of a single, dislodged boulder killing him while nobody standing around received a scratch. In hindsight, was it just a freak incident or an early warning? Today, so many are feared dead and everything has been washed away,” says Kolkata-based realtor Kamal Surana. On Independence Day in 2011, Rakesh Mehra, the owner of Ludhiana-based Rajit Paints Group, drove up to Chamoli in Uttarakhand to inaugurate the...
More »197 still missing as Uttarakhand avalanche toll touches 32 -Vijaita Singh and Devesh K Pandey
-The Hindu Efforts on to save 35 labourers in NTPC dam tunnel. Dehradun/ Joshimath: The operation to rescue about 35 Workers trapped inside a 2.5 km NTPC hydel project tunnel in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand continued on Tuesday, while the death toll in the aftermath of what Union Home Minister Amit Shah, described in Parliament as a snow avalanche, rose to 32. More than 197 people, including the trapped labourers, are...
More »Dam Workers Face Serious Hazards, Need Much Better Safety and Social Security -Bharat Dogra
-CounterCurrents.org The tragedy in Uttarakhand has again highlighted the extreme vulnerability of dam Workers who toil often in very hazardous conditions in very remote parts of the country, away from public gaze. In particular the hazards faced by Workers are very serious at several dam construction locations in the Himalayan region. While better safety conditions for dam Workers are needed everywhere, this need is particularly acute in the Himalayan region. In recent...
More »Clear impact of climate change in Himalayan disaster -Joydeep Gupta, Varsha Singh and Soumya Sarkar
-TheThirdPole.net As the world warms and glaciers retreat faster, the need is to brace for more disasters and minimise impacts by reviewing ill-planned dams and roads Under the weight of a suspected avalanche, a massive chunk of ice and frozen mud broke away from a glacier in the high Himalayas and fell into a lake that had formed at its snout due to climate change. The moraine around the lake collapsed and...
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