Seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have plunged into a government effort to clean the Ganga, promising to recommend a slew of river management and technology strategies to improve its ecological health. The 2500km Ganga is one of the country’s most polluted rivers laced with sewage and city waste although the government has spent about Rs 900 crore over the past two decades on a clean-up plan initiated in the late-1980s. An...

In the remote Raghopur block of Vaishali district in Bihar, the primary health centre (PHC) is supposed to be operational 24X7, with the medical officer in charge (MOIC) running the out-patient department between 8am and 12.30pm. On 8 May, the MOIC reached the PHC at 10.30am and left after an hour. According to patients, this was not a random event. Most of the 20-strong crowd awaiting medical attention is turned away....

Greenhouse gas emissions from rich countries fell a record 7 per cent in 2009 because of the recession, but the cut was entirely nullified by steep increases from fast-growing China and India, according to one of Europe's leading scientific research groups. Overall, this meant annual global climate emissions remained steady for the first time since 1992, says the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency which drew on energy-use data from the U.S. government,...

ALMOST all the maladies afflicting the Indian mining industry have manifested themselves forcefully in the mineral-rich State of Jharkhand. Indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, large-scale displacement of tribal people, and the rise of a mining lobby with immense political clout are only a few of these. Of course, in the last decade the State has also witnessed the rise of a number of people's resistance movements against displacement and environmental degradation...

The contrast between the disasters, more than a quarter-century and half a world apart, could not be starker. In 1984, a leak of toxic gas at an American company’s Indian subsidiary killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more and left a major city with a toxic waste dump at its heart. The company walked away after paying a $470 million settlement. The company’s American chief executive, arrested while in India, skipped...