03 Sep 2010 | India
I totally agree with the writer that substandard medicines are flooding our markets. I myself have had a harrowing experience when I bought a...
Indian people should now try to find out the truth about what has actually been happening in Kashmir. What else does anyone expect from Kashmiris...
This article has invoked memories from the 90s. I remember being taken for the identification parades by the army, being made to sit on the road...
Amit was one year my senior in Economics at JNU. His batch is one of the more illustrious one from those times at JNU. Sitaram Yechuri, needs no...
South Asia will be severely affected. The first lot of climate refugees are already migrating northwards in the Sunderbans. India has regions like Bundelkhand where floods closely follow droughts. In Maharashtra, most of the western part of the state was declared a drought area since there was no rain in July. A few days of rainfall in the first week of August has resulted in floods. The Siachen Glacier is the largest fresh water reserve in South Asia. It is the largest glacier outside the polar regions. For the last nearly twenty five years, ten thousand soldiers have been deployed on and around the Glacier in a military stand off with no end in sight. I have calciulated that over fifty metric tons of fuel is burnt every day for cooking and warming purposes since the area is at an altitude of over thirteen thousand feet. Besides the carbon footprint, the heat has been absorbed directly by the snow resulting in glacial melt. The entire area has been polluted by human waste, military garbage and junk which keeps getting buried under fresh snow. There is an urgent need to demilitarize the Glacier whose waters flow via the Nubra into the Indus. India and Pakistan do not seem to be in any hurry so it is now incumbent on the environmental lobby and the international community to not only get the countries to withdraw their soldiers but also to organise a major clean up operation. In another two decades there may not be any glacier left to fight over.