-The Hindustan Times Tribals in colourful and traditional attire danced in joy as the last of the 12 gram sabhas on Monday overwhelmingly voted against the proposed bauxite mining by Vedanta Group's alumina refinery plant in Odisha's Niyamgiri hills. With this all the 12 gram sabhas have voted against the proposed bauxite mining in the hills, driving in the proverbial last nail in Vedanta's fading mining hopes. Like all previous gram sabhas, the...

-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 Hindustan Times India's fabled growth story has just been exposed by an unlikely source - the World Bank (WB). Unlikely, because this institution is one of those most responsible for advocating economic growth as the pillar of development. In a report released on July 17, the WB states that the cost of environmental damage amounts to 5.7% of India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This effectively means (though the report fights shy of...

-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,...