Reports

The age of the sublime as far as projects in Karnataka are concerned is long over—it’s the age of the ridiculous now. The contractor for a mini-hydel project in the ecologically-sensitive Western Ghats has already started constructing the dam on one side of the river even though land on the other side has not yet been acquired. The project in question is the 12.5 MW Sahasralingeshwara (Nekkiladi) project on the Kumaradhara river in Dakshin Kannada district. The Nekkiladi minihydel project, on...

The Western Ghats have finally been granted UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) status. The tag came late on Sunday at the 36th session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) which is meeting in St Petersburg in Russia. Altogether 39 sites that dot the Western Ghats landscape will be part of the region that has been designated as WHS. The WHC decision reportedly came after intense lobbying by the Indian government. The Western Ghats almost did not make it to the WHS list after the International...

The Karnataka mining scandal provides a useful case study of the broader problems affecting India’s mining sector as it juxtaposes astonishingly serious regulatory failures with a relatively high level of capacity on the part of state governments. The assertion has been made in a 70-page damning report - Out of Control: Mining, Regulatory Failure, and Human Rights in India, released by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday. It said, “The mining scandals in Karnataka reveal the...

The Indian mining industry has spiraled out of control, and the government has miserably failed to regulate it. The scale of lawlessness in the multi-billion dollar industry is hard to assess, and the industry has not only fuelled corruption, but also wrecked havoc on both local communities as well as the environment. This overview of the mining industry comes from a 70-page damning report – Out of Control: Mining, Regulatory Failure, and Human Rights in India, released by New York-based Human...

The ire of hacktivist group Anonymous that was directed at the government over blocking of sites like vimeo.com and Pirate Bay may not have been justified - the ban on these sites, in fact, was not ordered by the Department of Telecommunications. In response to a RTI query made by the Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), the department replied, “As per available information no blocking instruction to block websites like Pirate-bay and Vimeo etc. has been issued by the Department of...

These days one scam is weirder than the previous one. But this one will take the cake—here we have a dam that, if implemented, will submerge the tail of another upstream mini-hydel project. The mini-hydel project in question is the 24MW Kukke Stage I project. Once commissioned, it will submerge the tail of an already operational 4.8 MW Hosamatha MHS (mini-hydel scheme) on the Kumaradhara river in Dakshin Kannada district. Authorities of the Hosamatha MHS have also submitted their opposition to...

The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has finally put up on its website the controversial report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP). This follows the judgment of the Delhi High Court on May 17 rejecting the ministry’s plea that the court set aside an earlier order of the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) asking it to put the report in the public domain. The MoEF, pushed into a corner on the issue a number of times, has invited comments from the general public...

The Western Ghats may not get its World Heritage Site status in the near future. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which assesses proposals for sites of natural significance, has asked UNESCO to defer granting the WHS tag to the Western Ghats. This means that the World Heritage Convention may drop this proposal now and India can submit a fresh proposal for nomination only after three years. The IUCN recommendation has been made in the IUCN Evaluation Report which...

As of now, it is a case of ironies, albeit quite bitter for some. With the police in the city, as elsewhere in the country, gearing up to enforce the Supreme Court’s directive on vehicles with sun films, many women are an apprehensive lot. The same tinted glasses that were seen by the court as one of the reasons perpetrators of crime manage to get away with impunity also provide a safety cover to a section of society that is arguably the most vulnerable to such crimes—women. Now, with the...

The Himalayas are warming more rapidly than the rest of the globe. Researchers have found that the average annual mean temperature during the 25-year period from 1982 to 2006 increased by 1.5°C, with an average increase of 0.06°C per year. This is about three times greater than the global average of temperature rise in the same time period. This has had an effect on rainfall too. The average annual precipitation during the same period has increased by 163mm or 6.52mm per year in the Himalayas...