-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-The Hindu     The catastrophe in the Himalaya is the result of deforestation, unchecked construction of dwellings and large-scale building of big dams A week is a long time in the Himalaya. In the late 1980s, I visited Arunachal Pradesh as a young researcher, with a keen interest in photography. I walked into the middle of the Dibang river, hop skipping over boulders, until my local tribal guide ordered me to return immediately....

-The Hindustan Times If there is one defining collage of the ongoing monsoon mayhem in Uttarakhand, it's this: multi-storied concrete houses collapsing like a pack of cards into an angry, wild river and cars and lorries being tossed around in the swirling muddy waters, as if they were plastic toys. As I watched the unfolding drama on TV, I remembered what a green campaigner told me some years ago in Uttarkashi:...

-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...

-The Hindu     There is little demonstrated evidence of health benefits from access to ‘improved' stoves and clean fuels Around three billion of the world's poorest people have to burn firewood, animal dung, crop waste and coal to cook food and heat homes, using traditional stoves and open fires. The health-damaging smoke that results is estimated to cause some four million premature deaths each year, principally of women and children. Although many governments, multinational...