Thar desert faces threat

rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot has asked the Union government to verify newspaper reports according to which the government is planning to bury nuclear waste in Thar desert. Down To Earth (Vol 9, No 3) had reported that plans are afoot to dump radioactive waste at Sanawada village near Pokran.

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The people of Bichhri , a village in Udaipur district of Rajasthan, have taken on themselves the challenging task of restoring their contaminated land and water. Fed up of the government's inability to do the same, the Jan Jagaran Vikas Samiti, a representative body of the villagers is all set to adopt the techniques of traditional rainwater harvesting to recharge and renew the water resources in the area ( Down To Earth , Vol 4, No 28).

Smokeless!

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A special technology mission is being set up by the government for states that have unsatisfactory population control records. The states are Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Assam, Bihar and Rajasthan. C P Thakur, the Union health and family welfare minister, said that the mission will help in providing focused attention to these states which have below average socio-demographic indices ( Down To Earth , Vol 9, No 3).

Deserted Delicacies

as the sun kisses the desert dunes near the Sam village in Jaisalmer, it signals the end of a hectic day for the tourists. This has been the last leg of their journey into the unknown. They return to their desert camp near the Sam dunes tired and hungry. However, a surprise awaits them -- a sumptuous fare of traditional desert food.

Cleanup time

Down with the dump

in march 1997 when the heavy drilling machines ploughed into the barren land of the desert village Sanawada, just a few kilometres from India's nuclear weapons testing site, Pokran, officials of the public sector Mineral Exploration Corporation Ltd ( mecl ) told the residents, "There are precious stones beneath the village." (Granite, experts say, is the cheapest stone -- sometimes even cheaper than bricks).

Right to know

Starving cattle

River Parliament

For British historians and administrators, Indian villages were self-sustaining units and they termed these units as village republics. Later, this terminology was done away with by historians and sociologists. Although utopian, villages situated along the Arvari river in Alwar district, Rajasthan, have retained the basic essence of a "self-sustaining republic," -- self-reliance and the power to take decisions about their natural resources on their own.