First food: business of taste
Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it
Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it
Shishir Prashant / New Delhi July 09, 2008, 0:18 IST The Uttarakhand government recently put off two major hydel projects, the 480 Mw Pala Maneri project and the 400 Mw Bhaironghati project, buckling under the man's arguments. Meet GD Agrawal, a Gandhian, who the locals initially thought was Sunder Lal Bahuguna. The environmental engineer is giving his all to preserve the environment. Shishir Prashant profiles this man of convictions who has trained some of the country's top environmentalists.
JAYANTA BASU A smoke-belching three-wheeler on a city road Calcutta's air will continue to be polluted by the exhaust of old autorickshaws running on adulterated fuel with the government putting the brakes on the conversion of two-stroke three-wheelers to LPG. After advocating conversion for five years, the government found "demerits' in the process. It has adopted a two-pronged strategy of replacing old two-stroke autos with four-stroke ones and penalising the thousands of illegal three-wheelers.
As a parent you might have wanted your child to be "a complan boy". But have you ever wondered whether the large number of nutrients printed on the labels of these 'health foods' are actually present in them? According to experts, most of these tall claims made by packed foods are just claims and the advertisement part of any product. "Since advertisements give visibility to products they are designed to create hype among consumers, so they make tall claims," opines Chandra Bushan, Associate Director at the Centre for Science and Environment.
In the first week of April this year, a group of men came and stood outside the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi. They carried placards with offensive slogans directed at me. We understood the 'protesters' were ostensibly from an NGO we believed was a front for the pesticide industry. We also understood the picket to be the latest in a dangerous pesticide industry mindgame.
If anybody needed a reminder of how crippling bureaucracy can be, consider the campaign to clean up the sacred Yamuna River in Delhi. The river oozes through town like a putrid ribbon of black sludge. Its level of fecal bacteria is 10,000 times higher than what's deemed safe for bathing.
DOWN TO EARTH Sunita Narain / New Delhi July 04, 2008, 0:00 IST We need a way ahead
With a price tag of about Rs 1 lakh, the Nano will cost about half as much as the cheapest car currently on the market. But, some environmentalists are dreading the prospect of hundreds of thousands of low-cost cars hitting polluted and over-crowded roads around the world in the next few years.
On April 11, the union cabinet gave the go-ahead to conservation authorities to sign an mou with international counterparts to protect the dugong and its habitat. Indian efforts to conserve this virtually unknown sea creature will get international recognition as a result. But this initiative has probably come too late. (Reference: Down to Earth)
PM Manmohan Singh on Monday released the much-awaited National Action Plan on Climate Change which aims to boost solar power generation in the country besides launching seven other programmes in mission mode towards greenhouse gas reduction and adaptation to inevitable climate change.
ravi aggarwal, director of ngo Toxic Links, has recently been conferred the who/ifcs (Chemical Safety) Special Recognition Award. He talks to arnab pratim dutta on different aspects of chemical regulation india: There is a hazardous waste law and a hazardous chemical law. But these don