Kathewadi village in Baramati taluka, hometown of Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar in Pune district, will soon become the only village in Pune to switch over to compact flourescent lamps (CFL). In two months time, the entire village will do away with the sodium vapour lamps and tubelights and switch over to the energy conserving CFL.

With only two weeks to go for the pre-monsoon deadline for road and drain works to be completed, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is struggling to meet the demands of the newfound stress on preparedness for disasters. First, even after allocating an additional Rs 110 crore for its works on widening and deepening the Mithi river, officials are unable to promise that a swollen Mithi will not cause floods as it did in 2005.

Villagers from the Bhiwandi taluka staged a

The Mumbai Fire Brigade is preparing itself to handle rescue operations all over the city in case of an emergency arising this monsoon. For the first time ever, 10 firemen went to the scenic town of Kolad, about 150 km away from Mumbai on the Goa Highway last week, to attend a course in flash flood management organised by a Canada-based NGO International Rescue Instructor's Authority (IRIA). Experts James Lavelly from Canada and Jeremy Hunter from UK trained the firemen in disaster management, in-commandant support and actual water rescue in the rough river waters of Kolad .

Sudharkar Paricharak, MLA who is the chairman of the MAHARASHTRA STATE ROAD TRANSPORT CORPORATION (MSRTC) has initiated a slew of measures to turn the public transport corporation into a service-oriented and profit-making body. He has taken several initiatives including starting phone service on buses, adding new vehicles to the existing fleet, starting incentive schemes for increasing the passenger traffic. The MSRTCis all set to post a record profit of Rs 150 crores in the current financial year. After a gap of 15-years, MSRTC earned a profit of Rs. 23 crores.

NCP supremo and Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has indicated that the scope of the loan-waiver scheme would be enhanced to cover even those farmers who possess more than 5 acres of land. He was speaking at NCP meeting in the national capital. Pawar said he had received demands from the farmers from Maharashtra as also elsewhere for enhancing the scope of loan-waiver package. He said the proposal was under consideration of the government.

The Social Forestry Department of the State Government has decided to set up National Green Corps (NGC) parks in each district by July 31. In a joint venture with the forestry department, the city-based Poona Club is engaged in wooing environmentalists

Land development, as wind turbine leader Suzlon is discovering in Maharashtra, is confronted with a peculiar problem. Once developed, land

It really makes you believe that old is gold when a Mumbai building adopts the water harvesting system that was used by the Harappan settlement in Dholavira in Gujarat some 5,000 years ago. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, formerly Prince of Wales Museum, became the first heritage structure in Mumbai to adopt rainwater harvesting recently. And, the inspiration came from Dholavira which excelled in water harvesting technology with dams, drains, reservoirs and storm water management that eloquently speak of the engineering skills of builders of that era.

Nandan Biomatrix, a Hyderabad-based agri-biotechnology and medicinal plantation company, is planning to set up bioinvestment eco-industrial zones (BIEZs) across the country. The project aims to bring fallow land under jatropha cultivation, which will be used to make biofuel.