Business is down at the Surya Chambal power plant, but not because of recession. It is the fuel. This power plant runs not on coal, but on mustard husk.

Saroj Devi's family of six used to spend over Rs 900 every month to buy kerosene for lighting the three lamps in her house. Their village, Lala Teekar, in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh has two rivers passing by and is often called the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of Moradabad. This is because the only access to the village—a narrow rickety road—closes during monsoons, cutting off access to the village.

What is the mandate of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (bee) set up under the Energy Conservation Act?

Energy efficiency is often called the low hanging fruit of climate change. Each unit of electricity saved is considered a unit less generated, which means less greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Under the 11th Five Year Plan, programmes promoting energy efficiency aim to save five per cent of energy consumption, or avoiding 10,000 MW addition in generation capacity.

A group of over 25 scientists, bureaucrats and activists released a statement on April 19, demanding transparency in India’s nuclear power programme. The statement was released a day after a clash between policemen and those protesting the proposed nuclear power plant at Jaitapur in Maharashtra. One person was killed and eight were injured in the clash at Jaitapur.

It was quite a role reversal. Moments after my photojournalist colleague Sayantoni and I introduced ourselves to the chief medical officer of Jhajjar district in Haryana, he did what we as journalists normally do. Reel off a barrage of questions.

Tucked away in the Barnawapara wildlife sanctuary of Chhattisgarh is a small village, Deba. The national power grid is yet to reach there. But there is no interruption in the scheduled power supply to its 75 households. While power cuts are frequent in grid-connected villages across the state, the only time Deba residents experienced a blackout since they started receiving electricity some seven years ago was in October last year.

INDIA is constructing six nuclear power plants—two each at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, Kakrapar in Gujarat, and Rawatbhata in Rajasthan. Together, they will generate 4,800 MWe of power, states the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board’s website. This is a big leap towards enhancing the country’s nuclear stature. But is the country equipped to face a nuclear radiation disaster?

THE Union budget’s approach to the renewable energy sector remains scattershot. The only mention the sector gets in the 2011-12 budget is when it talks about the duty cuts on the energyefficient LED lights, solar lanterns and solar cells.

The Union ministry of environment and forests has reiterated its stand against mining in coal fields demarcated 'no-go' zones. In response to the coal ministry's advice to allow mining in all coal-bearing areas, the environment ministry said it will be against the letter and spirit of the Forest Conservation Act.

Sifting through Delhi’s municipal rubbish every day, Anwarul Shaikh and Rupa Begum often find broken CFL bulbs mixed in kitchen and other domestic waste. The compact fluorescent lamps have replaced incandescent bulbs in garbage mounds in the past couple of years, Rupa said, picking a few up. The glass tube and plastic end cap of a CFL fetch them up to Rs 3. Of late, Anwarul has been complaining of restricted vision. “It’s difficult to recognise distance between objects and me. I keep bumping into waste,” he said.

WIND energy producers now have a year’s respite to comply with a government directive to accurately forecast their electricity supply to a power grid. An accurate forecast helps prevent demand-supply imbalances in a grid and reduces burden on states and power generators who have to make arrangements for last moment demands.

Rashmi Khatri is an astrologer. She recently renovated her office in Delhi, dividing it into two compartments— one for showcasing gemstones and other for attending clients. For the showroom space, she wanted adequate lighting without increasing the electricity bill. She chose imported light emitting diodes, or LEDs.

THE government of India barred a group of nuclear scientists from holding their annual meeting in India. Union Ministry of External Affairs refused permission to the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) to hold its meeting scheduled for December 9, terming its views “hostile to India”.

CHOOSING economic growth over protection of rich forests, the ministry of coal has written to the Cabinet secretary against demarcation of coal-bearing mines as “go” and “no-go” zones. In June, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) had set rich forests as out of bounds for mining. As a preliminary exercise, the environment and coal ministries identified 35 per cent area of nine coalfields as no-go zones.

THE Union agriculture ministry has refused to lower standards for imported milk despite some coaxing by the Barack Obama administration during the US president’s recent visit to India. The Department of Animal Husbandry said its milk import norms would remain unchanged.

Already marred by violence, tribals from the interior villages of Dantewada are facing a new challenge. A number of people last month died of or fell a victim to a water-borne disease. Though the state government maintains it is DVD (diarrhoea-vomiting-dysentry), experts suspect it to be as severe as cholera.

To reduce electricity losses due to outdated technology and theft, the power ministry has sanctioned more than Rs 10,000 crore to modernise grids.

PEOPLE displaced by the Pong dam are still waiting to be rehabilitated, forty years after the dam was built. They were promised canal-irrigated land in Ganganagar district, but the Rajasthan government is now offering them semiarid land in Bikaner. The dam in Himachal Pradesh supplies water to Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan.

MINING companies may now find it difficult to sign deals with governments of mineral-rich states. The Union Ministry of Mines has issued draft guidelines that would make it mandatory for states to sign agreements with private mining companies in a transparent way and notify them on state websites. The draft guidelines, uploaded on the ministry website on September 15, are open for public comments.

Sometimes you might go to a shop and in spite of protests handed a plastic bag. The bag will perish naturally, the shop attendant might tell you. In the past three years, different kinds of plastics claiming to be biodegradable, have entered the Indian market. But most of these brands that sell such bags do not meet Indian standards. The ones that do pass the test, are also being questioned as authorities are not equipped to test for 100 per cent degradability.

THE Great Indian Desert, Thar, is expanding, swallowing and degrading about 12,000 hectares of productive land every year.

S C Mehra, a retired Air commodore from the Indian Air Force, misses his friends in South Delhi's Sukhdev Vihar locality. One and a half years
ago, he and his wife moved out of their house in Sukhdev Vihar when they could no longer stand the pollution from a bio-medical waste treatment
plant in Okhla. "I stayed there for 20 years. It was long enough time to make friends whose company you enjoy after retirement. But I am not so
lucky. The smoke was becoming unbearable day by day and everything we touched was coated with a black layer of soot," Mehra said.

Satya Devi’s 35 apple trees have borne few fruits this year. The 60- year-old blames it on too little moisture in the soil and too much dust in the air that settles on the leaves.

South  Korean steel giant Posco’s faces another hurdle in Orissa even though it has invited bids from contractors and vendors for its proposed Rs 54,000 crore steel project.

Mining giant Vedanta’s proposed university in Orissa will not only be one of the few in the world with an outlay of Rs 15,000 crore and spread across 2,400 hectares, it will also sit on land rich in thorium deposits.

THE Union Ministry of Environment and Forests has stalled the construction of the private university funded by mining giant Vedanta Resources along the Puri-Konark marine drive in Orissa.

scientists from the International Business Machine Corp’s (ibm) and Stanford University in the US announced the discovery of plastics that could be biodegradable, biocompatible and completely recyclable. Organic catalysis is the new mantra in what is seen as a complete shift towards green polymer chemistry.

two incidents of fire in April ruined traders of the plastic scrap market in Mundka village in Delhi’s outskirts. While waste pickers search heaps of burnt plastic for metal scraps they can sell to buy a meal, the land owners in Mundka are hoping for better times. The plastic scrap market, possibly the largest in India, is likely to shift, which means they can get higher rentals. Mundka is now connected by metro rail and land prices have started spiralling.

Three-four soft drinks bought in paper cups with plastic tops, some biscuits in a plastic wrapper, a packet of chips for snack time and tetra-packed fruit juice to go with the meal. A person easily consumes this much in a day in Indian metropolises. But the plastic cups and wrappers take thousands of years to break down in a landfillthat is if they reach a landfill; most remain in the environment, clogging the soil and releasing polluting synthetic molecules.

on november 10, the central electricity regulatory commission (cerc) issued the draft guidelines for sale/purchase of renewable energy certificates. The proposed guidelines, open for public comments, may be finalized by the year-end.

the ministry of coal has decided to de-allocate coal blocks that were handed over to power generation, cement and
steel companies to meet their own requirement for coal, said a senior government official. Many of these companies have not started work on
mines for captive consumption even after a decade, the official added. The ministry therefore wants to weed out non-serious holders of captive
coal mines, the official said. The public sector National Thermal Power Corporation, Binani Cement, steelmakers Jindal Steel and Power

Environment ministry realizes it can reject shoddy EIAs