Poachers are having a field day in Bihar, courtesy India’s Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF, CC). The visuals of Asia’s largest antelope being gunned down reminds us of the Pre – Independence Jalianwala Bagh massacre by the arrogant Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyre in Amritsar, Punjab. Prakash Javdekar, Union Minister of State (Independent […]
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Thursday, 23rd of June will go down in the history as a date on which the United Kingdom took a historic decision, which is called as political earthquake. In a people’s referendum it was decided to stay in the European Union (EU) or not to stay. The referendum was based on simple voting pattern which […]
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Revival of Asiatic lions is one of the rarest success stories, found anywhere on the planet. It is a known fact that to save the rare lion the conservation efforts had to also protect their habitats in and around the core protected area—Gir National Park & Sanctuary in Gujarat. The efforts succeeded in increasing […]
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Geographers claim that ‘geography matters’ in the social lives of people. However, our understanding of how it matters is always dependent on the role we assign to geography and how exactly it works. One way is to look at social institutions as shaped in response to geographical factors. Alternatively, geography may be traced to the […]
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VINOD TARE Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur vinod@iitk.ac.in The 2013 Uttarakhand floods: Two faces of a disaster July 2013: The Himalayan regions of India are geologically fragile and highly eco-sensitive, and hence prone to certain types of natural disasters. Among the Himalayan states, Uttarakhand has been notable for a plethora of […]
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Justice Umesh Chandra Banerjee remembers his father-in-law Professor S P Chatterjee as a disciplinarian with deep devotion towards his work. As the greatest guiding spirits of his life, he looked up to two personalities and in his words ‘treated them as God’ – one, his own father, the best criminal lawyer of his times, and […]
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Chairman of Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), Ministry of Water Resources, Dr B M Jha is entrusted to provide scientific inputs for management, exploration, assessment, and regulation of groundwater resources of the country. What has been the water table scenario in the district of Ladakh? Groundwater level in the region of Ladakh varies widely due […]
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Professor of paleo – climatology in the Department of Geology, The Durham Kumaun University, Nanital, Dr Kotlia has undertaken nearly 500 glacier studies using extensive field work and GPS technology. Is it true that the glaciers of Ladakh (e.g.Khardung glacier) have thinned? Mountaineering guides, for example, say glaciers which once needed sophisticated ice craft to […]
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The 74 year old retired civil engineer, Chewang Norphel is fondly known as the Glacier Man of Ladakh. Coming from a middle class family of Leh, Norphel joined the Rural Development Department of Jammu and Kashmir in Ladakh (1960) as a civil engineer. Are the glaciers in Ladakh declining – at what rate? Yes! Undeniably […]
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Middle class consumption patterns around the world, not population in the South, is the most immediate ecological challenge. But with sprouting middle classes in India and elsewhere, mapping the geography of responsibility for hazardous global environmental changes is now a complex matter. Population explosion – population bomb – population problem – population overload… These are […]
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