15 years of living in Bangalore I suspect I have mild hearing loss. While travelling by public transport, women are seated in the front of the bus - close to the noisy engine and horn. I wonder if this layout aggravated it.

I have now moved to a rural area - but even here the sound of internal combustion engines is ubiquitous - brush cutters, tipper trucks, and tourists - who come to enjoy the quiet countryside but insist on playing their favourite music loudly in their vehicles. The weekends are the noisiest.

With a high threat to severe lung problem and many more, i would be very keen to work for this cause. Kindly supply details.

Its ashame that they don't have more rules and regulations on these things.

Thanks for putting significant amount of data. However article has been exagrating profits and need to check some of shared information on productivity level -
1. How many goats kid twice in a year. In present management condition our surveys from 30 places across country has shown that it is less than 30%. 35% goats has kidding interval (time period between two successive kidding) more than 18 months.
2. Mortality of goats has been more than 22% as per data collected by 22 NGOs across 6 states from selected project areas.
3. Article has been biased to see only meat as goat product. Interetsingly over 4% of our milk production comes from goats with estimated 10% potential. Poor goat rearing families invariably depends on goat milk for nutrition.
Especially talking abour Rajastahn and not looking milk contribution is amazing for those who has worked on grassroots with goat faramers in eastern rajasthan.
A special issue on goat milk can be a timely article to look this business from livelihoods point of view.
At present average profits per goat has not been more than Rs 1000 for average farmers.

So looking increasing grazing land or feed availability (which is constrant for any livestock in fact), emphasis on productivity has not been focussed in any government program. There is surely limited scope of grazing land management given the prevailing conditions but productivity has scope of almost doubling the product from same number of goats if work on it taken seriously. Perhaps goat has been only large livelihoods where technology and management has not seen any input from the people highly educated.