Look out of the window the next time you travel by road or by train anywhere in India. Hit a human settlement, and you will see, heaps of plastic coloured garbage apart, pools of dirty black water and drains that go nowhere. They go nowhere because we have forgotten a basic fact: if there are humans, there will be excreta. Indeed, we have also forgotten another truth about the so-called modern world: if there is water use, there will be waste. Roughly 80 per cent of the water that reaches households flows out as waste.

The Punjab government, severely rattled by a TOI report on hundreds of tonnes of dead fish clogging its canals and polluting drinking supply, said on Friday that the poisoning of the Satluj and Beas rivers will

Systemic changes in governance are happening gradually. For instance, officials are scared if they do something under political pressure, they know they are answerable to the public. The enthusiasm for the act is there and it will go up- Ravleen Kaur

People have to be placed at the centre if conservation has to make sense universally. What makes things even worse, is that these so-called protected zones allow commercial activities to go almost unchecked- Ravleen Kaur The earth is cracked and the horizon bare.The deathly silence is broken by the occasional whirring of crude-oil pumps.Women, going about their daily life in bright mirror-work lehangas, add a dash of colour to an otherwise arid background. This tough terrain has dominated 50-year-old Shantabhai Maganbhai Bamania's life since he was 10.

Sandip Das Launched in February 2006, UPA government's mega National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which for the first time guaranteed 100 days of manual labour to each rural household, continue to make news for all the right as well as wrong reasons. Initially launched in the 200 backward districts as identified by the Planning Commission, the impact of NREGA has been a mixed bag.

With a latest report projecting the country's mining industry to touch over $30 billion (about Rs 1,27,662 crore) accounting for about 2.5% of the GDP in the next four years, pertinent questions still remain if the sector can live up to the hype and noise of its potential.

Anumita Roychowdhury, of CSE's Right to Clean Air Campaign, says: "Government and industry data on heat trapping CO 2 emissions that directly depend on the amount of fuel burnt, show that oil guzzling vehicles are hitting the road.'

Over 250 rallyists from various citizens' networks, NGOs and RWAs took part in a pro-BRT march organised on Sunday on the threekm stretch between Khanpur cros- sing and Chirag Dilli. The participants shouted slogans, asking the government to implement and extend similar corridors, citing examples from a recent CSE report, which shows a rise in the number of cyclists and bus commuters after the project was introduced.