In India, mining is one of the main economic activities since time immemorial, giving rise to a long historical tradition of artisanal mining. As modern mining rose during the colonial occupation, artisanal mining activities began to be overlooked and this great tradition became obscure.

Despite being located in the seismically highly vulnerable region, Uttarakhand shows an elaborate tradition of constructing multistoried houses. Both the local dialects of the region (Kumaoni and Garhwali) have unique words for identifying four different floors of a building. This suggests common occurrence of multistoried structures in the region. Rajgarhi area, Uttarkashi District has a large number of intact multistoried

T-Zed Homes, a housing complex on six acres of Varathur Road in Bangalore has new age apartments built by Biodiversity Conservation India Ltd (BCIL), Asia's largest green building company.

Rivers in the southwest coast of India are under immense pressure due to various kinds of human activities among which indiscriminate extraction of construction grade sand is the most disastrous one. The situation is rather alarming in the rivers draining the Vembanad lake catchments as the area hosts one of the fast developing urban-cum-industrial centre, the Kochi city, otherwise called the Queen of Arabian Sea. The Vembanad lake catchments are drained by seven rivers whose length varies between 78 and 244 km and catchment area between 847 and 5,398 km2.

San Francisco may soon boast the greenest buildings in the US.