-Livemint.com The river interlinking project will adversely affect land, forests, biodiversity, rivers and the livelihood of millions of people Interlinking of rivers is a very expensive proposal. It has huge adverse environmental impacts on land, forests, biodiversity, rivers and the livelihood of millions of people. It is a socially disruptive proposition. It will not only add to climate change impact (destruction of forests means destruction of carbon sinks, and reservoirs in tropical...

-Down to Earth None of the 30 low and middle-income countries analysed met the standards of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women In what could be a wake-up call to global conservation efforts, a new report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says that legal protections for indigenous and rural women to own and manage property are missing in India and 29 other...

-India Today Experts claim that afforestation in the degraded areas include monoculture plantations which is not sufficient to create the ecosystem required for wildlife to thrive. Union environment minister may have a plan to regenerate the degraded forests of the country but that might not revive the lost wildlife and biodiversity because artificial ecosystem cannot be a substitute for the natural process. Forest experts have claimed that massive afforestation in the degraded...

-Hindustan Times The decision to protect the Mangar Bani forest in Faridabad and a 500-metre buffer as a no-construction zone is a remarkable one. This declaration by Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar recently has been widely welcomed, and could mark a turning point in the battle between the government and environmentalists campaigning to save the Haryana Aravallis, especially the Mangar Bani. The region is under threat from real estate developers and...

-DNA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly knowns as NREGA, is the most romantic and largest development project in human history. It is extremely popular and invited widespread hatred. It embodies remarkable scope for alienated people and effortless corruption for powerful people at the lower level. The amount spent on it over the last nine years is about Rs3.50 lakh crore. The average number of jobs generated per year...