Supreme Court wants hazardous waste rules aligned with Basel Convention THE Supreme Court has directed the Centre to ban the import of hazardous waste. While hearing a 17-year-old case, the court also asked the government to amend the existing laws pertaining to toxic waste so that they comply with the Basel Convention, an international treaty that prohibits transboundary movement of toxic waste. India ratified the Convention in 1992. The court gave the...

-The Hindu In the summer of 2011, production at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant ground to a halt, as workers agitated to set up a union independent of the Maruti Udyog Kamdar Union that represented workers at the company’s plant at Gurgaon. The strikes and lockouts eventually dragged on till the fall, and cost the company approximately $500 million in lost production. On Wednesday, nine months after the company finally agreed to recognise...

-The Economic Times The government plans to intervene in the use of water by industries and encourage conservation of the increasingly scarce resource by setting up a 'bureau of water-use efficiency' to grade various sectors and issue guidelines, official sources said.  "We'll start with the industries and analyse whether they are water friendly or not," said a senior official at the ministry of water resources.  For this, the ministry has roped in industrial...

Model community forestry initiatives in Orissa are defying Forest Department efforts to control and exploit the region’s forests. ‘Heaven is a forest of miles and miles of Mohua trees / And hell is a forest of miles and miles of Mohua trees with a forest guard in it!’ Thus goes a song of the Muria Adivasis in the forests of Bastar in central India. Encapsulated in this simple expression, however, is...

-Inclusion.in There is good news. And there’s bad news. The good news first. There’s been a bumper wheat crop and the granaries are overflowing. And the bad news? Where do we begin? A lot of that grain will rot. Millions will still remain hungry. Heavily in debt and distressed, farmers are committing suicide. Food prices are soaring. There’s more… Farmers don’t have money. Their land is too small and isn’t yielding much. Fertilisers and...