Archives: Environment

There can be genuine problems with running an environmental campaign year after year. Since you can’t harp on the same tune all the time, there is a morbid tendency among campaigners to innovate. At times, certain innovative measures can even be bizarre, or just downright stupid. So it was with the largest British water company, Thames Water’s study that was launched during the World Water Week on August 25. The peg of the press release issued by the company was, “A third of UK women leave the shower running while shaving their legs, wasting around 50bn litres of water a year...

In October, the husband and wife pair of Munir Ahmad and Syeda, farmers of Laskhar Pur village in Pakistan's duzafargarh District with their six children, should have been planting wheat. Only, they weren't for their four acres of land that normally produces two crops a year of cotton and wheat, had been damaged by the floods. They had tried hard to protect their fields by building mud embankments, but the floods were unprecedented. The flooding destroyed their cotton crop that had been close to harvest. The loss was not just of crops. Munir and Syeda lost the income they need to...

It's an irony of sorts. One of the most popular food chains in India is arguably one of the worst when it comes to food safety. Haldirams has been rated Red in Greenpeace's Safe Food Guide version 2.0 that ranks 25 of the most popular food companies which hold a major share of the market in the country. Based on their responsibility towards Indian consumer on the GM food issue, the Guide categorises companies as Green, Yellow and Red. Apart from Haldirams, other major companies that have made it to the Red list include Nestlé, Pepsico, Cargill, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, Britannia,...

For the past one week, it has been the same story every day. It has been raining, pouring, making the city of Delhi a bigger mess than it was the previous day. The newspapers are full of photographs the following morning telling us the hell others have been going through too. Immediate problems beget immediate reactions. The civic bodies are to blame for the mess, we are told. And the blame game goes on. Now, now, tell us something new, will you? While it is a fait accompli that the metropolitan disorder one has to wade through is only a clinical manifestation of the ineptitude of...

A disaster becomes a farce when the underlying tragedy gets buried, for whatever be the reason. That is just what has happened with the Supreme Court order paving the way for more malls and luxury apartments in the congested metropolis of Mumbai that should translate into billions of rupees for mill owners. It is not just the court ruling which will be environmentally calamitous for Mumbai. The real tragedy lies in the fact that all voices of reason have been drowned in the Babel of eulogies that have been flooding the newspapers and the news channels. Trust the media to slut...