Bad water for Srinagar's upmarket areas

all summer, tankers supply water to upmarket Srinagar, but they don't meet safety norms. They are filled at Iqbal Park filling station with the help of pressure filters, which don't meet norms set by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation and the Union ministry of urban development.

Locust menace worsens in Ladakh

The people of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, are grappling with the menace of locusts, the migratory grasshoppers. Experts suspect that the pests, Locusta migratoria, have migrated from neighbouring China along the banks of the river Indus due to climatic changes.

Polluted Lidder river casts cloud over pilgrimage

POLLUTION levels are rising in the Lidder river in Pahalgam, the base camp for pilgrims going up to the Amarnath cave (3,952 m) in Jammu and Kashmir.

Road to Amarnath

In the recently concluded summer session of the state legislative assembly at Srinagar, a new controversy on the "road to Amarnath" has divided the Jammu and Kashmir government. Gurcharan Singh Chadak, minister ofroads and buildings, informed the assembly that his ministry had proposed the construction of a macadamised road to the Amarnath cave from Pahalgam for which funds had already been allocated.

Dam deferred

For the second time, Pakistan has put off the inauguration of the controversial us $6.5 billion Diamer-Bhasha dam over river Indus. To be located in Diamer district of Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, the dam has been strongly opposed by the local people and even India.

Home grown power

For the Indian public, Kargil brings back memories of war. But here in Tikat village, 11,000 feet above sea level in Kargil, Jammu and Kashmir (j&k), people feel their district will soon be known for the state's first community-managed micro-hydel project.

In Short

baglihar collapse: A diversion tunnel at the Baglihar hydro-electric dam on the Chenab river in Jammu and Kashmir collapsed on June 5, 2005, due to the river's rising water level. Media reports said construction at the project site had to be halted. Earlier, a bridge had also reportedly been washed away due to the river's increased flow.

Cedar crisis

over 70 per cent of cedar trees, also known as deodar, have vanished from the forests of Jammu and Kashmir following the ban imposed on timber exports by states like Himachal Pradesh way back in 1977. To meet the demand for wood, mass destruction of the state's forests has taken place since then. Almost 3,500 to 4,000 truckloads of logs has been transported from the state daily. The government also signed various wood-supply contracts with industries and exported about 3,000 logs of cedar daily to other countries.

Baglihar progress

Pakistan's request to stop work on the Baglihar dam on river Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has been turned down by Raymond Lafitte, the neutral expert appointed by the World Bank (WB). WB had recently chosen Lafitte, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, to mediate in the dispute between India and Pakistan (see Down To Earth, 'Bilateral loss', June 15, 2005). Lafitte and the delegations of the two countries met for the first time in Paris on June 9-10, 2005.

Double trouble

battle-lines have been drawn over the 330-megawatt (mw) Kishanganga hydel power project being set up in the border town of Gurez in Jammu and Kashmir (j&k). Leader of National Conference, the main opposition party in the state assembly, Nazir Ahmad Gurezi, who represents Gurez, recently threatened to resign from the assembly and launch a protest against the project.