Sukinda: Top of the Dirty Thirty heap
Sukinda valley in Orissa has made it to the top ten of the world's 30 most polluted places. Seventy years of intensive open-cast chromite mining have resulted in a scarred landscape, toxic water and soil, ruined agricultural fields, degraded forestland, and populations that are being slowly poisoned
Silent Valley buffer zone: Major step in environment protection
In a move that's being hailed by environmentalists, the Kerala government has decided to set up a 148 sq km buffer zone around the Silent Valley National Park, home to a rich variety of flora and fauna. This should put to rest fears of a new hydel power generation project coming up in the area
Break it up and speed ahead
Although not a new phenomenon, the trend of breaking up various components of an infrastructure or industrial project in order to bypass environmental clearances and seemingly reduce the project's overall impact, is gaining in popularity all across India
Give developing countries incentives to maintain their forests: Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics, explains how climate change has globalised the consequences of pollution, and describes an initiative that addresses it and global poverty at the same time
Orissa's tribals: Give us only what's rightfully ours
Tribals living near the Badrama Wildlife Sanctuary in Orissa step up their demand for rights over natural resources, in keeping with the new Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006
Northeast of Eden
India chooses to showcase the northeast as an exotic tourist destination of great natural beauty. Several documentaries at a recent environmental film festival in Guwahati showed it as a neglected corner of the country, with gaunt tribals and civil and political unrest
Indian tobacco giant turns carbon philanthropist
Environmentalists and international justice groups are voicing their concerns over proliferating tree plantations, as developing countries try to profit from a growing carbon trade. The India Tobacco Company claims to have stepped into the carbon sinks business in order to benefit village communities. But who really profits?
'Acronyms are killing the planet'
Jargon-laden negotiations ensured a Kafkaesque crisis of communications at the just-concluded climate change conference in Nairobi
Kashipur's 13-year anti-mining struggle vindicated
The Report of the Indian People's Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights has termed UAIL's bauxite mining operations in Orissa's Kashipur region unconstitutional, illegal and against the people's interests and demands that it be scrapped. Will the state ignore these concerns in the mad rush to speed up industrial development?
A bottom-up approach to sanitation
South Asia has 900 million people without sanitation. The problem, as the success of recent total-sanitation community projects have demonstrated, is not a lack of funds but a lack of conviction amongst people that they need sanitation, and that they can meet those needs themselves