-The Indian Express People do not want to risk their homes, fields, pastures, forests and rivers in the name of development. Most of such development work in the Himalayas is being carried out without an understanding of its fragility, seismicity, glacial behaviour, climatic changes and their collective destructive power. The flash floods due to the burst of an artificial lake created by a huge landslide (rock, frozen mud and ice) in Rishi...

-The Hindu India’s leaders must recommit themselves to the ideas and activism of environmentalists involved with Uttarakhand Following flash floods at Chamoli in Uttarakhand, defence personnel are looking for missing persons in a mélange of rock, mud, water, and debris, airlifting rations to inaccessible villages, and repairing bridges and telecommunication networks. Social scientists are assessing the disaster’s impact on the region’s economy. Scientists and policy makers are debating whether climate change or...

-NDTV blog If you had invested all your savings in the stock market at the end of March last year, by now, you would have almost doubled your money. But in the same period, India's GDP in today's prices would have slid by at least 9-10 percent. Anyone who looks at this divergence will say that the markets have completely 'decoupled' from the economy. Conventional wisdom tells us that this is a...

-The Hindu The need of the hour is to invest in long-term crisis response mechanisms and resilience solutions Days after a glacier burst in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand caused flash floods, the scientific community is still struggling to understand what triggered the disaster. At the time of writing this article, the death toll was 34 with more than 170 people missing. The floods have also caused heavy damage to public and...

-Down to Earth The issue is about carrying capacity of the fragile region, which is even more at risk because of climate change The flash flood in high Himalayas, which has claimed lives and wiped out two hydroelectric plants on the Ganga, should be a grim reminder of the mistakes we continue to make. There is no rocket science here about why this devastation happened. The Himalayas are the world’s youngest mountain...