SOUTH ASIA
no more crawling: The Sri Lankan transport ministry recently started a programme that would take action against passenger buses that are driven very slowly. Transport minister A H M Fowzie said that slow driving wastes passengers' time and had been banned several times but private bus drivers have always ignored the rule. He added that short and middle distance bus services take more than an hour to travel a few kilometres and regulations against overloading, reckless driving and not issuing tickets go unheeded. Sri Lanka has an 18,000-strong private bus fleet.
Green regulations: A five-member bench of the Pakistan Supreme Court recently ordered the country's Environmental Protection Agency to find out whether industries in Islamabad conformed to prescribed environmental regulations. This came in response to a petition filed by Nazir Ahmed and 200 other residents of the city's sector I-9 and I-10 who claimed that emissions from the factories in the area, particularly from steel furnaces and marble processing units, were causing life-threatening diseases like asthma, respiratory infections, allergies and heart diseases. The bench also directed deputy attorney-general Nasir Saeed Sheikh to get a report from the law ministry on the government's non-compliance with one of its orders that was passed seven years ago, seeking the establishment of environment tribunals across Pakistan to look into environment violations.
Related Content
- South Asia macro poverty outlook 2024: country-by-country analysis and projections for the developing world
- Addressing the impact of climate change on women farmers’ health in South Asia
- Urgency of heatwave risk management
- Comparative study of carbon rights in the context of jurisdictional REDD+: case studies from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean
- Fossil fuel subsidies and GHG emissions: firm-level empirical evidence from developing Asia
- Global status report on road safety 2023