Dumps trickle into the rivers and occasionally collapse, flooding homes and fields with muddy water The reddish hills dot large tracts of the Goan landscape—mounds of waste soil and other debris that have been left behind after iron ore was dug out from some 95 mines. Accumulating since the 1960s, the dumps, as they are known, are estimated at 750 million tonnes (mt) and consist of top soil, mud and iron...
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Centre to set up Rs. 1,000-crore fund to promote housing for poor by P Sunderarajan
It will provide credit risk guarantee to banks on the loans Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday announced that the Centre was considering setting up a credit risk guarantee fund with a corpus of Rs. 1,000 crore, to start with, to encourage banks to lend to the poor for housing. Emphasising that developing housing for the poor was critical for sustainable urban development, he said: “To encourage banks to lend in significant...
More »Key rules flouted in (Bhushans) Noida farmhouse allotments: UP govt audit by Maulshree Seth
Remember the over 100 farmhouse plots allotted in Noida measuring at least 10,000 sq m each without an auction or a draw of lots, including two to Supreme Court advocate Shanti Bhushan and his son Jayant Bhushan? An audit has now found that not only was there no transparency in the allotment of these plots — 101 in all — but that the Noida Authority had fixed a very low rate,...
More »Climate conference approves landmark deal
-AP A UN climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a complex and far-reaching programme meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades. The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries under the same legal regime enforcing commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest. The deal also set...
More »Barefoot-An unfinished agenda by Harsh Mander
We have five million children in the labour market, say official figures. Their actual numbers may be four times as many. As a nation, we have failed each one of them… Millions of our children still labour today, in factories, farms, kilns, mines, homes and city waste dumps, when they should be in school or in a playground. We profoundly fail these children, collectively depriving them of education, play, rest, healthy...
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