-The Hindu The Environment Minister insists on clearing all hydro projects, even when the government itself earlier agreed that the Himalayas must be avoided for development work. A battle of epic proportions between the hydroelectric power companies and the people of Uttarakhand has now culminated with the struggle shifting to the office of the Prime Minister of India. It began with the extraordinary and far-sighted 2014 decision of the Supreme Court in...
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Thirty-eight Indian cities in high-risk earthquake zones
-IANS NEW DELHI: At least 38 Indian cities lie in high-risk seismic zones and nearly 60 percent of the subcontinental landmass is vulnerable to earthquakes. Barring rare exceptions, such as the Delhi Metro, India's hastily-built cities are open to great damage from earthquakes. The earthquake that devastated Nepal on saturday and jolted northern India, damaging buildings as far apart as Agra and Siliguri, was expected by geologists, who have warned of more...
More »Delhi at high seismic risk with unplanned growth, flouting of norms -Moushumi Das Gupta
-Hindustan Times New Delhi: About half of Delhi would have flattened out had the epicentre of Saturday's morning earthquake been in or near the national capital. DK Paul, professor emeritus at IIT Roorkee's earthquake engineering department and part of the team that carried out a microzonation study of the capital in 2007, told HT that devastation in Delhi would be many times more not only on account of its high seismicity (it...
More »The long road to growth -TR Shankar Raman
-The Hindu As power lines and roads slice up forest cover, it becomes clear that a knowledge economy must tackle development with a wider perspective than that of mere short-term gains In just two meetings in August 2014 and January 2015, the National Board for Wildlife considered projects involving over 2,300 hectares of land in and around wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. In four meetings between September and December 2014, the Forest...
More »SC kept in dark about threat from six Uttarakhand dams -Nitin Sethi
-Business Standard The Supreme Court asked the Union environment ministry to review six specific hydroelectric projects on the upper Ganga basin in Uttarakhand. On Wednesday, the ministry informed the apex court that its expert committee had checked and found the six had almost all the requisite and legitimate clearances. But, the ministry did not tell the court the experts, in the report to the ministry, had also warned these dams could...
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