-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...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Behind hydel project washed away, a troubled trail to accident in 2011 -Jay Mazoomdaar
-The Indian Express “Imagine the odds of a single, dislodged boulder killing him while nobody standing around received a scratch. In hindsight, was it just a freak incident or an early warning? Today, so many are feared dead and everything has been washed away,” says Kolkata-based realtor Kamal Surana. On Independence Day in 2011, Rakesh Mehra, the owner of Ludhiana-based Rajit Paints Group, drove up to Chamoli in Uttarakhand to inaugurate the...
More »Chamoli glacier burst: Himalayan blunders compounded -Sunita Narain
-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...
More »An ecologically illiterate Budget -Ashish Kothari
-The Hindu On several significant items relating to the environment, allocations have remained stagnant or fallen In 1991, when the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh ushered in economic reforms that catapulted India into the global economy, I had asked him how he intended to balance rapid economic growth with environmental protection. He said that the experience of the West is that once there is enough money in the economy through growth, it...
More »197 still missing as Uttarakhand avalanche toll touches 32 -Vijaita Singh and Devesh K Pandey
-The Hindu Efforts on to save 35 labourers in NTPC dam tunnel. Dehradun/ Joshimath: The operation to rescue about 35 workers trapped inside a 2.5 km NTPC hydel project tunnel in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand continued on Tuesday, while the death toll in the aftermath of what Union Home Minister Amit Shah, described in Parliament as a snow avalanche, rose to 32. More than 197 people, including the trapped labourers, are...
More »