Lethal Games

Worse, and almost predictable now, the Indian government does not regulate or monitor the use of these inimical chemicals, putting children at risk.

Home truths

Modern houses are suffused with harmful chemicals. One of them is lead, present in paints. It is banned in several countries but not in India. The Centre for Science and Environment tested popular paints in India for lead content. It found 72 per cent of the samples had lead much higher than the voluntary limit specified by the Bureau of Indian Standards. Only the Dulux brand of ICI was lead-free; Asian Paints cleaned up later.

The street fight

Our world changed a little when we published the study on pesticide residues in soft drinks. In the work we do, fights go with the territory. We need to challenge institutions -- government and private -- in the public interest. What we had not anticipated, however, was the sheer power and the virulence of the attack. The fact is that the two companies affected -- Coca-Cola and PepsiCo -- were incidental to our story on pesticide contamination and the need for food standards to regulate safety.

Wash out

Detergents, their environment concerns and the regulations to control them have evolved side by side in the developed world. Detergents were developed during the Second World War. They became popular in the late 1950s and the first regulation to control their environmental impact was enacted in 1961 in Germany. So what's there in detergents that harms the environment? Detergents are not easily biodegradable; more so the detergents of the 1950s.

RESIDUE OF A REVOLUTION

Bhola Singh is dead... Bhola Singh was a farmer from village Balloh, district Bhatinda, Punjab. He is part of a story with a beginning and an end. But it has no middle. Thus what follows is a fragment. But it is not fiction.

Pollution pays

The Mahajans, a family of four who live in Vasant Kunj, South Delhi, daily waste 240 litres of water to get 30 litres from their reverse osmosis (RO) purifier six times a day. "I bought the purifier thinking it will end all our water woes. It gives us clean drinking water but I feel guilty about the waste," says Meenakshi Mahajan. 'Experts' have informed the family that the wastage is quite normal for such water-cleaning gadgets.

After the People met

This question was asked in an official letter in February this year. The letter had a genesis: an unprecedented gathering of nearly 50,000 people from Meghalaya's tribal communities at Smit, West Khasi Hills. Heeding the call of chiefs, people endorsed on January 14 this year a historical "People's Budget". Filling up a large rolling meadow in the capital of the traditional khasi kingdom of Khyrim, people discussed, altered and sculpted into final shape a five-year financial plan to develop their villages.

COLANISATION'S DIRTY DOZEN

The Pollution Monitoring Laboratory (PML) of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) places in the public domain its analysis of the contents of 12 cold drink brands sold in Delhi. Three bottles of each of the 12 brands were purchased from markets across the city and analysed to see if they contained pesticides.

Pesticide residues in bottled water

There was a time in the recently liberalised past when people didn't quite know how to refer to a new product called drinking water. They would say 'bottled water' and 'mineral water' to freely refer to one or the other kind of water, perhaps meaning the same one. It used to be confusing. People were not used to drinking water that had to be bought. People were getting used to paying money to drink water. Paying more money for their water than they did for milk everyday.

The age of discovery

Approximately 80 per cent of all calories consumed in the world come from genomes that are similar to rice. The fact that the rice genome is relatively small, and the availability of modern efficient genetic transformation techniques, have enabled rice scientists to explore this grass in depth. An essential aspect of rice genomics will be 'allele mining', helping the development of more desirable varieties of rice by isolating certain qualities.