Environment

Sixteen years after the Karnataka High Court ordered the closure of all abattoirs within Bengaluru city limits and instructed the state government and the municipal authority to construct alternative facilities on the outskirts of the city, the first steps in that direction are visible. According to Dr K P Ramesh, official working at the Animal Husbandry Department in the Bangalore Bruhat Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), a new abattoir is being built on a 40-acre site within the KSIDC industrial estate at Harohalli, 34 km from the city and is expected to be commissioned by mid-2019. Not only this, concrete steps are…

Will environmental issues finally bask in the electoral limelight? If events across some of the major Indian cities in the past few years are to go by,  it is definitely the time for green issues to shine. The environmental issues plaguing the internet-savvy electorate as well as the poor sections of these major cities may finally become an integral part of the election discourse. Over the past year, the national capital has garnered the most attention for environmental issues, compared to other major cities in the country. Cleaning of the polluted river Yamuna, considered holy by Hindus, has been a…

We have all heard of carnivorous plants like the Venus Flytrap, that trap and devour insects. But less known is the fact that some plants of the Ceropegia species, actually deceive and entrap insects, for pollination! Here's how the Ceropegia flowers work, and it's quite complicated. Spiders and other insect predators often trap and eat honeybees, and there are some flies that love to eat these honeybees, too. The flies are able to smell the scent of the dying honeybees, and congregate to feed off the bees even as the predators are eating them. Since they are, in this sense,…

Karnataka government’s ambitious project of supplying treated water from Bengaluru to the arid districts surrounding Bengaluru ran into problem, when the Karnataka High Court directed the government to stop the pumping of treated water until further instructions. However experts say the idea of reusing treated water is a good one by itself, if proper processes can be put in place. But with protests by residents of the districts supported by their elected representatives growing louder by the day, will this project get killed even before the government attempts to make it work right? The idea of using treated water to…

After intense overnight showers, Bhubaneswar woke up on a Saturday morning in July with half the city under water. The situation at the capital of the eastern state of Odisha in many ways typifies poor urban management in India that is crumbling under adverse climatic conditions. Residents in many parts of the city were stranded in their homes and the condition was so dire in some parts that the state’s disaster response team had to start rescue operations. Roads in the state capital looked like gushing streams. Disaster response forces moved to waterlogged areas with floating pumps to drain out…

Bengaluru has 11,000 acres of designated forest land on record, but the draft master plan released recently doesn’t show even a part of this, said Dipika Bajpai, Indian Forest Service officer, who is a Deputy Conservator of Forests (DCF) in charge of Bengaluru. She said her department has compiled a list of objections to the master plan to dispute the non-inclusion of forest area. Dipika was talking in a discussion organised by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and Citizen Matters, in collaboration with Bangalore International Centre on July 14, 2018. Vidhi Centre and Citizen Matters have joined hands to publish…

Every Chennaiite who has lived through the floods of 2015 has a quiet apprehension about the monsoon. The revelation that the 2015 flooding, which left scores dead and Chennai in shambles, was the result of inaction on the part of officials, has increased the distrust among the public. However, a joint effort by various stakeholders to renew and restore close to a 100 water bodies under the Greater Chennai Corporation has been underway for many months now. The Goals of Restoration Flood mitigation, renewal of water table and rejuvenation of water bodies constitute the aim of the initiative that has seen…

As many as 150 volunteers from VMWare India participated in a community electronic waste (e-waste) collection and awareness drive, under the bE-Responsible programme, on July 21st, from 11am to 1 pm. These volunteers walked the streets in small groups and went door-to-door to collect e-waste from households in three areas of Bengaluru - Koramangala 4th Block, ST Bed and Jakkasandra Extension Layout, says a pressnote from ENSYDE. Shweta Kadaba, a resident from Palm Springs Apartment in Koramangala 4th block, appreciated the initiave. “I gave the volunteers an old printer which had been lying in my apartment for the last 8-9…

When my son and daughter-in-law invited us to Singapore, we of course were happy to go stay with them. However I had my own reservation about the place, because I thought it was a concrete city. After seeing the beautiful Rockies of Canada with my son and daughter-in-law, I did not know what to expect in Singapore! As we travelled by the ultra-clean train from the airport early in the morning, I did see the city dotted with varieties of high-rise buildings. But I was surprised to see a lot of green pockets in between. My stay in Singapore was…

If you have a maxed out your credit card, you may be scrambling to pay your outstanding bills. India’s technology hub, Bengaluru, with its dying lakes and mushrooming urban growth, is facing a similar situation – it has overexploited its groundwater and is now struggling to keep up with the demand, according to an expert. “We are using groundwater like an overdrawn credit card and we don’t have the capacity to repay,” said Samrat Basak of World Resources Institute India (WRI India) expanding on an analysis by the global research organisation. The WRI India analysis, accessed by Mongabay-India, notes that…