Reports

Soon enough, the leopard might become as endangered as the tiger is. Four leopards have been poached and their body parts entered into illegal wildlife trade every week for 10 years in India. If the trend is unchecked, the leopard too may be pushed to the brink of extinction. And, the leopard is arguably paying a collateral damage for its more precious cousin, the tiger. As of now, almost 90 per cent of leopard seizures are that of skins. One of the reasons for the selective targeting of...

An appraisal panel of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has virtually thrown the Madhav Gadgil Committee report on the Western Ghats out of the window. The Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) of the ministry has favoured environmental clearance for the contentious 200MW Gundia Hydroelectric Power Project in Hassan and Dakshina Kannada districts. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which had been asked to specifically look into the Gundia project apart from its widely-known...

The Centre has at last formed a high-level group which is to look into the report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which had stirred a hornet’s nest with its stringent sets of measures that were to protect the ecologically fragile Western Ghats. The nine-member group, which is to be headed by Planning Commission member K Kasturirangan, is loaded with experts who have had little or nothing to do with the Western Ghats. The group formed by the ministry of environment and forests...

The age of the sublime as far as projects in Karnataka are concerned is long over—it’s the age of the ridiculous now. The contractor for a mini-hydel project in the ecologically-sensitive Western Ghats has already started constructing the dam on one side of the river even though land on the other side has not yet been acquired. The project in question is the 12.5 MW Sahasralingeshwara (Nekkiladi) project on the Kumaradhara river in Dakshin Kannada district. The Nekkiladi minihydel project, on...

The Western Ghats have finally been granted UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) status. The tag came late on Sunday at the 36th session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) which is meeting in St Petersburg in Russia. Altogether 39 sites that dot the Western Ghats landscape will be part of the region that has been designated as WHS. The WHC decision reportedly came after intense lobbying by the Indian government. The Western Ghats almost did not make it to the WHS list after the International...

The Karnataka mining scandal provides a useful case study of the broader problems affecting India’s mining sector as it juxtaposes astonishingly serious regulatory failures with a relatively high level of capacity on the part of state governments. The assertion has been made in a 70-page damning report - Out of Control: Mining, Regulatory Failure, and Human Rights in India, released by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday. It said, “The mining scandals in Karnataka reveal the...

The Indian mining industry has spiraled out of control, and the government has miserably failed to regulate it. The scale of lawlessness in the multi-billion dollar industry is hard to assess, and the industry has not only fuelled corruption, but also wrecked havoc on both local communities as well as the environment. This overview of the mining industry comes from a 70-page damning report – Out of Control: Mining, Regulatory Failure, and Human Rights in India, released by New York-based Human...

The ire of hacktivist group Anonymous that was directed at the government over blocking of sites like vimeo.com and Pirate Bay may not have been justified - the ban on these sites, in fact, was not ordered by the Department of Telecommunications. In response to a RTI query made by the Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), the department replied, “As per available information no blocking instruction to block websites like Pirate-bay and Vimeo etc. has been issued by the Department of...

These days one scam is weirder than the previous one. But this one will take the cake—here we have a dam that, if implemented, will submerge the tail of another upstream mini-hydel project. The mini-hydel project in question is the 24MW Kukke Stage I project. Once commissioned, it will submerge the tail of an already operational 4.8 MW Hosamatha MHS (mini-hydel scheme) on the Kumaradhara river in Dakshin Kannada district. Authorities of the Hosamatha MHS have also submitted their opposition to...

The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has finally put up on its website the controversial report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP). This follows the judgment of the Delhi High Court on May 17 rejecting the ministry’s plea that the court set aside an earlier order of the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) asking it to put the report in the public domain. The MoEF, pushed into a corner on the issue a number of times, has invited comments from the general public...