Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Environment Links: River Issues In India

Sharing a few interesting and informative articles I came across in the past few weeks on rivers.

Endangered Himalayan Rivers: This one is from 2012. A large number of dams are planned on the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers in the state of Uttarakhand.  Parineeta Dandekar writes about the weaknesses and bias in the Environment Impact Assessment process.

Rally For Rivers Plan. Will It Help?: The Rally For Rivers campaign by the Isha Foundation is calling on creating a 1 km wide tree plantation along the river banks. This, they claim, will help rejuvenate India's dying rivers. Veena Srinivasan, Sharad Lele, Jagdish Krishnaswamy and Priyanka Jamwal with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru examine their claims in detail and find them wanting.

Caution Warranted For River Linking Project: The gargantuan river linking project envisages a series of dams and canal systems to transfer water from Himalayan rain and snow fed river basins to the drier Peninsular rivers in the south. Is it worth it?

Reuter's Erroneous Reporting On The Ken-Betwa River Linking Project: Two rivers in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are to be linked. SANDRP clarifies that the permissions process has yet to be completed. The two states don't even have a water sharing agreement! Reuter's screwed up.

Environment Ministry Panel Reject's Uttar Pradesh's Religious Smart City Plan: I'm including this to give an example of the utter indifference to ecology and environment shown by "planners and developers". The plan is for a smart city to be built inside the Hastinapur wildlife sanctuary, along the banks of the Ganga, which would have destroyed dolphin habitat and river ecology along a 7 km stretch. How does one even come up with such ideas? Fortunately, the usually pliant Environment Ministry has balked at approving this outrageous plan.


2 comments:

  1. When we were kids, sometimes we cousins used to get together and say "let's go to a movie". We'd just drop whatever we were doing and go, not caring which movie, whether we'd get tickets,or anything. It showed good spirit on our part.
    Now if we decide on government projects in the same manner, you are expected to say "good spirit! keep it up"

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  2. Certainly that's the government's expectation :) Fortunately, civic society "bad spirit" is what is stopping the environment from being completely decimated.

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