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.

DDA bans concrete construction on Yamuna banks Some more good news: Away from the Yamuna riverfront, renovation work under way at the ancient Humayun's Tomb in Delhi on Wednesday. In a development that has come as a big relief to environmentalists and conservationists in the Capital, the Delhi Development Authority has decided not to allow any new proposal for concrete construction on the Yamuna banks in view of the upcoming 2010 Commonwealth Games in the city.

The Lieutenant Governor has directed the Delhi Development Authority not to allow any construction for recreational use on the Yamuna river front (Zone

Missile man and former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, in the role of an environmentalist, has called upon Delhites to be involved in cleaning of the city's lifeline, Yamuna river. The ex-president is a man of his own stature and thinks very deeply. These days Dr Kalam is busy in social works. As regards the river Yamuna, it has been polluted from whereever it is flowing, near Kanpur, Allahabad and Agra by industrial units established there as also the people living there. Near Kanpur Dehat, the dirty water from leather factories is drained in the river.

It is aimed at creating public awareness about the city's ecological units

Even the most ardent proponents of industrialism would acknowledge that we are in the midst of an environment crisis. Rates of species extinction are 1,000 times more than what they were before human beings dominated the earth. The rate of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere today is 30 times more than when the Industrial Revolution started. Urban India is slowly waking up to this inconvenient truth.

In which we attempt to assess what average Indians living in big cities think about India's environment, and to gauge their levels of awareness, attitudes, perception and concerns Methodology

* Air pollution in India causes 5,27,700 deaths every year (WHO) * 21% of communicable diseases in India are related to polluted water. In India, diarrhoea alone causes more than 1,600 deaths daily (WHO) * Only 22% of the wastewater generated in urban India is treated, severely polluting rivers. The total wastewater from Delhi and nearby areas flowing into the 19 drains that connect to the Yamuna is around 3,296 million litres a day, of which 630 MLD is untreated.

As the World Environment Day would be celebrated on Thursday, the Yamuna river would project a grim picture about increasing pollution level and dip in the water quality. "The Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) load, an important indicator of pollution level has increased by 13 per cent over last year," Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has said in its latest 2007 report.

If Earth survives, so shall life