Category: News

As India endures blanket of smog, China’s battle offers lessons

As New Delhi suffers through a surge in the most harmful type of smog — a toxic stew that makes India’s capital one of the most polluted in the world — Beijing offers lessons in how another troubled city made progress clearing the air.

China, which for more than a decade has been the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, has made its capital the focal point of a clean-up drive. It’s replacing some of its coal-burning facilities with cleaner fuels, encouraging electric vehicles an ..

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Courtesy: The Economic Times

Deadly air pollution becomes a common enemy for arch-rivals India and Pakistan

From his office in the smog shrouded city of Lahore, environment official Saif Anjum pores over reams of pollution data and lists the actions being taken by Pakistan’s largest province to combat the toxic air. He said they have arrested hundreds of crop-burning farmers and closed construction sites and industrial furnaces.

But those efforts risk being for naught without collaboration with Pakistan’s nuclear-armed arch-rival India.

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Courtesy: The Economic Times

Children Don’t Smile in Dhanbad Villages – Their Water Is Poison

Sixty-eight-year-old Himanshu Chakrabarty of Brahman Tola village in Ghadbad panchayat of Dhanbad has only one desire – death. For more than 15 years, he has suffering from weak and deformed bones with almost no flesh on his body, limping around like a living skeleton. A sufferer of a crippling disease called fluorosis, which is caused due to an excess intake of fluoride, Chakrabarty wants an end to his pain. “I only want death,” he cries out in pain. “How much more do I have to suffer?” Read more

Courtesy: The Quint

Curse of silicosis haunts ‘village of widows’ in India

Bundi, Rajasthan, India – At first glance, Radha Bai and Hira Bai do not appear to be crusaders. On a September afternoon, the two frail and elderly women, their heads veiled by the loose ends of their brightly coloured saris, could be heard raising loud slogans outside the administrative offices of the district of Bundi, in the western Indian state of Rajasthan.

They were demanding their rights to compensation, leading a group of 80 widows whose husbands worked in mines and had succumbed to what the locals call the “curse” of this region – the fatal respiratory disease, silicosis.

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Courtesy: Aljazeera

Over 19k tribal applications pending FRA approval

Nashik: As many as 19,810 applications from tribals, both individual and groups, are still pending approval of the district Forest Rights Act (FRA) committee.
The panel is headed by the officer at the level of additional district collector. Many of these applications are struck at various levels before they are forwarded to the FRA panel for approval.

Other than this, there are 765 other cases where although the nod has been given by the panel, they are awaiting signatures of the competent authority before it could be presented to the applicants.

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Courtesy: The Times of India

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