As the railways minister, Mamata Banerjee may have flagged off many yatras in the past one year but the journey she has begun in her hometown of Kolkata promises to be the most ambitious yet.

On the grimy, filth-lined streets of Bhopal's walled city that were stalked by death more than 25 years back, the outrage following the June 7 judgement in the gas tragedy criminal case by a local Chief Judicial Magistrate's (CJM) court has slowly made way for quiet dejection. In the prevailing mood of gloom, the fears of the survivors of the world's worst industrial accident have come true.

In a remote village of district Chamoli, Uttarakhand, farmer Hari Singh no longer needs to travel to the distant bank branch.

Shock, horror, outrage. Those were the dominant reactions when the world woke up to the nightmare of Bhopal on that December morning in 1984. Over 26 years later, those were again the dominant reactions following the judgement of the Bhopal district court last week which awarded a shamefully light two-year sentence to the seven accused in the world's worst industrial disaster.

Bhopal was a nightmare come true. "Bhopshima" was a befitting name given to it by the greatest living Indian jurist, Justice Krishna Iyer. Public angst required the State to act; the CBI swung into action and found the directors of Union Carbide guilty of a host of provisions of the Indian Penal Code.

That India is on the verge of a serious water crisis is a foregone conclusion. So much so that the possibility of water riots in the future can't be ruled out. And it's not that the farmers of Vidarbha in Maharashtra or Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh are the only casualties of depleting groundwater level.

Foreteller of death and winged messenger of ill-luck, the owl has always had a diabolic aura in the popular imagination. The bird's elusive and nocturnal nature may be to blame, as could be its horns, eerie screech and chilling lidless stare.

The global recession may have turned many millionaires into paupers, but for the ship-breakers at Alang, a coastal stretch near Bhavnagar in Gujarat, it's been like manna from heaven.

An advocate of natural farming methods for more than a decade, Kanchipuram-based Gandhi Gopalakrishnan was shocked to see lush mango farmland turning infertile by the dumping of rice husk ash (RHA). "The farmers are deceived by claims that RHA helps the fertility of the soil, when the contrary is true," he says.

An advocate of natural farming methods for more than a decade, Kanchipuram-based Gandhi Gopalakrishnan was shocked to see lush mango farmland turning infertile by the dumping of rice husk ash (RHA). "The farmers are deceived by claims that RHA helps the fertility of the soil, when the contrary is true," he says.