-The Indian Express Destruction of her murals shows the rot in the museum. The mindless destruction of Ganga Devi’s extraordinary last works at the Crafts Museum is terribly sad. It highlights the caste system between art and craft, the indifference to the creative integrity of a craftsperson’s vision. The quoted reaction of a Crafts Museum official, “Don’t worry, I’ll get another kohbar ghar painted” shows that, even for someone who claims...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Iconic Madhubani painter Ganga Devi's famed Kohbar Ghar or bridal nuptial chamber at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum here has been completely painted over. The Kohbar Ghar room was painted with murals over three to four months in the 1980s, when Ganga Devi, who passed away in 1991, was undergoing chemotherapy in a Delhi hospital. It had images of marriage scenes from Hindu scriptures, including those of...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com Dehradun: Maletha village in Tehri Garhwal is very angry. Men, women and children sit on the road in dharna, demanding that a stone crushing company grandly called Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram be evicted from their village. The villagers’ problems began in February 2014 when two stone crushers arrived in Maletha with their machines. Their operations created an ear-splitting noise and belched clouds of dust that settled on crops and orchards. In August, another...

-The Hindu The Environment Minister insists on clearing all hydro projects, even when the government itself earlier agreed that the Himalayas must be avoided for development work. A battle of epic proportions between the hydroelectric power companies and the people of Uttarakhand has now culminated with the struggle shifting to the office of the Prime Minister of India. It began with the extraordinary and far-sighted 2014 decision of the Supreme Court in...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: More than two-thirds of the sewage generated in 118 towns, located in the Ganga river basin, get discharged into the country's national river untreated, making the task of its rejuvenation a long drawn process. Recent findings of a report, prepared by a team of experts from different government agencies, have noted that these towns collectively generate over 3,636 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage as...