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Cover Story

New Delhi has become the hub of the burgeoning air traffic in Asia. But does it have the mathematical precision to avoid traffic snarls in the air?

News

Space opera

After years of pranged possibilities and piggyback rides, India has attained independent satellite launch capability

A dose of patent power

In this GATT era, Indian drugs and pharmaceutical scientists have belatedly begun to focus on drug, rather than on process, development

Slippery bacillus

Despite desperate combing operations, the plague bacillus is playing hide-and-seek with doctors

Durga's decibels

Rats on the rampage

Powering the elite

No funds for rural project

Fear strikes the heart

Mapping the danger zone

Probing farmers' potential

Surge of money in energy sector

GAP told to clean up its act

A Supreme Court order has put the fate of the ambitious Ganga Action Plan in doubt

Interview

'Water planners ignore social issues'

Nepal is slated to be a major hydropower supplier in South Asia with the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Australian government for a US$ 590-milli...

Science & Technology

Big bite

As the malaria parasite and its mosquito carrier become increasingly immune to pesticides and drugs, a recourse to vaccines seems to be the only option

Manipulating life

Biological molecules hold the key to understanding diverse life processes and to correct aberrations

Soot and diamonds

Dark glow

Garlic wards off TB

Batty architects

A shot for the heart

No-fear syringe

Analysis

Reaching for the Skies

New Delhi has become the hub of the burgeoning air traffic in Asia. But does it have the mathematical precision to avoid traffic snarls in the air?

Green standards put india in the red

Several Western nations have decided to stipulate high environmental standards for the goods they import. The step demands the substitution of several chemicals deemed harmful with ecologically benign ones, and suitable technological modifications -- an expensive proposition. Many see the measure as little more than camouflaged protectionism

Bound in leather

India is struggling to meet the environmental standards that its leather importers have stipulated

Hide and seek

Europe has taken the lead in preparing an eco-label for leather products

Green Dot busters

Germany's packaging ordinance could let money out of India's export till

The environment war

The army has taken to environment resuscitation with prganised fervour, but is still facing a barrage of criticism from state forest

Operation desert sands

Soldiers are forcefully bunginging saplings into Bikaner's parched soil

Unwilling bull's eyes

The people of the Netarhat plateau in Bihar refuse to move out of the range of fire

Special Report

Beating about the bush

Many important issues were hardly touched upon at the recently concluded conference on bioresources

The Fortnight

Smelly bargain

Developing nations insist that industrialised countries are reneging on their part of the deal in cleaning up the atmosphere

Free trade regime in fetters

Internecine wrangling in Europe and the US has hindered the establishment of the World Trade Organisation, which intends to bring about a sea-change in international commerce

Moneymakers

The shrinking sea

Central Asian states wrangle over water use, even as the world's 4th-largest inland waterbody dries up

China goes car crazy

The land of proletarian bicycles might soon be taken over by cars, which will bring in their wake the problems of pollution and dwindling energy supplies

South Asia

Thar she blows

Bananas over bananas

Bio-treaty ratification blocked

Cleaning 'wet markets'

Bad holdings

Robot boom

Leader

The protection racket

A RECENT study conducted by the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Bombay shows that about 60 per cent of Indian exports go to the industrialised countries. This should be cause for immediate, close attention for anyone who is familiar with the growing trends in the environmental standards of internationally traded goods.

What a waste

LAST week, Australians admitted to their interest in selling hazardous waste to India for recycling. It is telling that hazardous waste has been dumped in India before, often indiscriminately and irresponsibly. This lackadaisical attitude towards toxins was the reason for the signing of the Basel Treaty on the Transfer of Hazardous Wastes in March 1991.

Flight of fancy?

WITH the successful flight of the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-D2), India has gained a foothold in an exclusive international space club. But sobering the optimism expressed after the successful launch of the 870 kg IRS-P2 satellite is the fact that Indian space scientists have a long way to go before they can exploit these capabilities for commercial gain. It is probable that the huge investments made in this resource intensive sector will show few monetary dividends in the near future.

Crosscurrent

Gimme eat!

In America today, the revolutionary question is not how to get food to eat -- it's what and how much

Catching viruses

Brand new infectious maladies such as Jacobson's disease have begun to plague the world, despite better sanitation and medication in developed countries

Review

A purge for choking cities

TODAY, the gloomy scenario of blurred faces framed in countless tenement windows seems to have wafted right out of an Eliotsian elegy into the equally foggy reality of urban existence in the developing world. As the concrete jungle raises its teeming head, so does the clamour for its attendant needs: water supply, sanitation, public health, roads and street lighting.

Dyeing it green

or the campaign child of non-governmental organisations. It has come of age as a respectable middle class concern. Perhaps it is ready to graduate into commodity fetishism? Business establishments are certainly alive to this possibility, recasting themselves in an environmentally friendly image. Educational and research institutions, too, have responded by introducing green syllabi and funding tomes on the subject. Environmental Perspectives...

Between cup and lip

AMONG the many grand schemes consigned to the commodious dustbin of the 20th century, a special place belongs to an oxymoron called democracy. Its disenchantments have directly given rise to the call for "another development", the notion of participatory movements on the ground which can, in theory, undermine existing power structures and determine national policy from below.

The niece's tale

Development can spawn curious offspring. The prospect of involving rural women in a refresher course on the importance of maintaining vegetable gardens surely qualifies as one of these. And that's precisely what Growing Together, a 28-minute film by Joss Brooks, purports to do.

Living off the sun

Living Solar (8mins) documents the successful experiments of the people of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, in tapping the full potential of solar power. It shows how this township uses solar energy to meet household and commercial needs. Aurovillites have become pastmasters in manufacturing solar power-based appliances: they will soon be setting up their first solar-powered 28 kilowatt sub-station.

Grassroots

Saving to survive

Impending doom has prompted villagers in Bihar and Orissa to protect their forests from natural calamities. And humans

The fruits of people's power

A small village has proved that people's management of forests can bring prosperity

Letters

Biased BNHS

I was surprised to read in Rogue Elephants in the Backyard (August 15, 1994), that the Bombay Natural History Society (bnhs) allegedly "debunks" my study on crop raiding by elephants. While the bnhs study provides an additional or a different perspective to the subject, it cannot claim to debunk earlier studies. I wish I could see the results of the BNHS study first in journals reviewed by my peers. (The only paper published in their 11-year study has been in their own journal!)

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