Environment has been given short shrift in the budget with finance minister P. Chidambaram concerning himself only with the thousands of tons of garbage being generated in our cities everyday.

Attero Recycling, India’s sole integrated recycling company for e-waste, has hit upon a novel method of teaching the local kabariwallahs how to handle hazardous waste.

Attero Recycling, founded by brothers Rohan and Nitin Gupta, has developed its own proprietary technology to extract precious metals, including copper, lead and gold, and also recycling hazardous materials emanating from electrical appliances.

Air pollution has jumped to number five spot amongst the top killers in India.

Releasing India-specific data, the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) warned that outdoor air pollution caused 627,000 deaths and 17.7 million healthy years of life lost in 2010. Worldwide, outdoor air pollution caused 3.2 million premature deaths and over 74 million years of healthy life lost in 2010.

With China having given the go-ahead to the construction of three more dams on the Brahmaputra river in Tibet, India too has fast-tracked the construction of 200 mega and small dams in the Brahmapu

The apex Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) of the environment ministry has gifted away 5,000 hectares of pristine forest, much of which provides crucial corridors for animals to move from one habitat to another.

The FAC has recommended the diversion of 60 hectares of forest located within the Gola corridor in Uttarakhand. Green lawyer Ritwick Datta points out, “This corridor is the only feasible path for the movement of elephants across the Gola river but it is being diverted for the construction of the NH-87 connecting Rampur to Kathgodam.”

The environment ministry is hardly a “green roadblock ministry” as is being made out by the PMO.

The MoEF’s Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) on River Valley and Hydroelectric Projects considered a total of 262 hydropower and irrigation projects in the last six years and green signalled every single one of them. Contrary to the PMO’s claims, not a single project has been rejected. This means that between 2007 and December 30 2012, stage 1 clearance was given for hydropower projects with an installed capacity of 48,456 MW which is 25 per cent more than what India has installed in 66 years of independence.

An environmental scientist’s arrest for granting clearance for a limestone mine in Orissa is the tip of the corruption iceberg that is floating freely in the environment ministry.

A cash stash of `1 crore was allegedly recovered from the Gurgaon and Rohtak premises of Neeraj Kumar Khatri, who works as a deputy director in the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF).

Prof. A. Ajayaghosh, a scientist with the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, has won the Infosys Prize 2012 in physical sciences for his pioneering research in the field of supramolecular architecture. This research can play a key role in early cancer diagnosis and in the early detection of the presence of different kinds of explosives.

Explaining the details of this innovation, Prof. Ajayaghosh explained, “We assemble molecules using weak forces in order to create different kinds of architecture in varying sizes and shapes. This special class of molecules, called pi-systems, can communicate with each other and when they do so, they undergo a change in their properties which can be utilised for different applications.”

A public interest project to mitigate NCR’s increasing water shortages initiated from the PMO in 2009 has seen another letter being fired to the PMO wanting to know why it is stalled.

Water activist Vani Sundarji (wife of former Army Chief Gen. Sunderji) wrote to national security adviser Shiv Shankar Menon last week asking why WAPCOS, a public sector company, which had already done the original R&D study for the project and submitted it to Delhi Jal Board (DJB) has now been asked to adopt a merely supervisory role.

In an effort to curb the rapid dieselisation, the Environment Pollution Prevention and Control Authority (EPCA) has called for a proposal to impose both a one time green tax on new cars and also reintroduce the system of owners paying an annual tax on diesel cars.

The EPCA describes this as “an annual environment compensation charge amounting to 2 per cent of the purchase value of a petrol car and 4 per cent of the purchased value of a diesel car.” The second tax they want levied is an “environment compensation charge of 25 per cent of the sale value of the diesel car to be collected by the dealers at the time of the sale.”