Delhi: The 2010 Auto Expo had at least seven efficient 'green' passenger cars out on stage. But the eco-friendly cars won't be seen in India anytime soon due to a range of infrastructure issues. Here are the challenges that each class will face in India.

CNG CARS

* Inadequate refuelling stations across cities.
* Bulky CNG kits often eat into boot space of cars.

HYBRID VEHICLES

The clean image of the Naveen Patnaik Government could well be consigned to a bottomless pit if recent charges about the organised plunder of the state's precious mineral wealth manage to stick.

Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal plans to replicate Israel's success in apple cultivation in his state. "With no snowfall and much lesser rain than us, they produce 50 tonnes of apple per hectare.We produce one-fifth of it, " he says. Apple production dropped almost to half in the last season while prices rose to around Rs 100 per kg.

Everyday at half-past-nine, Father Mathew settles down at the workshop in the St. Mary's Church campus of Phulwarisharif, Patna, where he stays till 5.30 p.m. His day is spent not dealing directly with the divine but monitoring and fine-tuning the manufacturing process of solar appliances.

Ever since his second term as prime minister began in May, Manmohan Singh has been out on foreign tours so often that in South Block he is now jocularly known as the 'Flying Sikh'--a sobriquet reserved for India's most famous athlete of the 1960s.

For a species that is facing the gravest threat to its sole habitat we seem to be pretty casual about saving it as the recently concluded Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen demonstrated. You could forgive the dinosaurs--they didn't know that a meteorite was going to clobber the earth leading to catastrophic climate changes and their rapid extinction.

After a recent order by the Union Government forbade displaying animals in circuses, elephants at the Calcutta Zoo as well as at the 15-odd circuses that visit the city have been asked to migrate. The Government says that the enclosures are too small for the big animals. "We have been playing to full galleries for decades," says a manager of a circus.

The Ganga has been given a new breath of fresh air. Or at least that's the plan. To save the river from further pollution, the city administration has clamped prohibitory orders on both banks of the Ganga under Section 144 of the CRPC. District Magistrate A.K. Upadhyaya says no one can use the banks "as dhobi ghats, to throw corpses and garbage or use soap while bathing".

For a rural medical practitioner from the interior of Orissa's Ganjam district bordering Andhra Pradesh, the sight of huge flightless birds on a visit to Hyderabad in 2005 was a life-changing event. It was love at first sight for 48-year-old D.

The Good Earth

Subhash Arya's underground alternative to air-conditioning has fought cynicism and inertia and is nowbeating the heat.