FORESTS: Losing its soul

View from the top

Planners must stop looking down at hill-stations

High risk

Problem: Tall buildings risky in high seismic zones; Status: Hill-stations are getting concretised and growing vertically; Challenge: Use local …

What goes down

Problem: Lack of space for garbage disposal; inadequate sewerage; Status: Garbage disposed on hill slopes ends in streams/rivers; Challenge: …

Defying gravity

Problem: Terrain forbids water supply systems that work in plains; Status: Water crisis in peak season every year; Challenge: Develop …

Local travails

Problem: Tourist influx too large; earnings flow downhill; Status: Residents forced to share meagre facilities with tourists; Challenge: Regulate …

New Age Approach

We need to go back to the drawing board to reinvent a green toilet. If necessary, to go back to our past and find technological innovations that …

Drowning In Human Excreta

Sanitation for urban India means building flush toilets and linking them to sewer systems. But the price of chasing this dream is leading to an …

'Let's put our cards on the table'

Veteran UN negotiator and head of the UNEP during the Rio summit, Mostafa Tolba, reasons why developing countries always suffer at the hands of …

World's biggest trade fair

The US used partnerships to counter multilateralism

Battle of the brackets

The Plan of Implementation is a list of vague expressions

Bhutan’s experiments with happiness

The idyllic Buddhist kingdom believes that peace and happiness should take preference over material growth. In a world beset by inequities and …

Churu says yes to hygiene

The district is all set to become the first in Rajasthan to completely stop open defecation. Will others follow?

Loo and behold

Sewage stink

Many townships in Greater Noida are not connected to the sewage system

Ugly is the new beautiful

A group of anonymous citizens in Bengaluru is cleaning filthy streets and inspiring change across India

Kitchen strike for toilets

Women of a Maharashtra hamlet give husbands an ultimatum-build toilets or go without food

Change is for the obdurate

Junk stops here

Meet bureaucrat Yishey D Yongda, determined to turn Sikkim into a zero-waste zone

On green track

Railways has fitted more bio-toilets this year than the total number fitted in the last three years

Excreta's economy a true experience

Flush, but don't forget

Corporation for Sustainable Development

Water riddles

Shanghai-ed