-The Telegraph Jorhat: Villages near the Doyang hydroelectric project in Nagaland today pledged to protect amur falcons, which are killed every year during their brief visit to the area while migrating from Asia to southern Africa. The villagers trap and kill thousands of the migratory raptors for their meat when they visit the wetlands near the project site in the state's Wokha district between the end of October and beginning of November. Amur...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: The ministry of environment and forests has denied forest clearance to the 1,500MW Tipaimukh hydel project in Manipur and the 3,000MW Dibang multipurpose project in Arunachal Pradesh. The forest advisory committee (FAC), which met on July 11 and 12, has stated in its report that in both projects, the requirement of for-estland is large and will have an adverse impact on the general ecosystem of the area. Civil society organisations...

-The Hindu Uttarakhand reiterates that our rulers have contemptuous disregard for the advice of the best scientists and would rather listen to contractors and builders to whom they are beholden for funds In the early 1980s, while doing research on the environmental history of Uttarakhand, I sometimes visited the library of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun. Most of the journals in the library dealt with geology and earth sciences,...

-Live Mint Fast clearance of river projects and the lack of disaster preparedness have wreaked havoc in Uttarakhand Relief operations in disaster-ravaged Uttarakhand have ended and the time seems ripe to take account of the institutional frailties that have contributed to the ongoing human disaster in the state. Chief minister Vijay Bahuguna has been blamed for inaction when the disaster first struck and has also admitted that the state did not...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: It's clear that the devastation caused by the flash floods and landslides in Uttarakhand was at least in part due to environmental degradation of fragile mountain slopes and reckless commercialization. Yet, weeks before the calamity state CM Vijay Bahuguna had railed against "environmentalists" and "Green Statutes" for hampering development work during a May 23 meeting in Delhi with Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Plan deputy chair, to finalize...