'E' for Environment

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With mega discourses on global warming and climate change dominating news broadcast, print and the web, it came as a surprise when school children responded with blank expressions at a recent interaction on environment at an English medium school in an up-market neighbourhood of South Delhi. It was quite mellowing to see that these inquisitive students, who are going to inherit a very messed-up environment and the burden of extreme lifestyle shifts to tide-over impacts of degradation, have not been touched by a day-to-day understanding of terms like global warming, e-waste and toxics. As one broke these concepts into manageable examples, expressions changed and questions started flowing in and two very worrying trends emerged from these queries. First one is the dangerous lag that exists between what is packaged as education, via textbooks and knowledgebase of the teachers, and what is happening in the real world that....

2007: A year of massacre for Delhi trees

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As the National Capital prepares to usher in the New Year, the year that steps into the past will be remembered most for the massacre of thousands of trees of Delhi that have seen many New Years come and go. An unofficial count of the trees felled in the past four to five years is estimated to be around 40,000, the official figures are not forthcoming and vary as per the individual departments. However, the felling in the year 2007 was the most brazen and painful, as the chainsaw drew closer and closer into the very heart of the city's green lungs, with the trees planted when the capital was envisioned, and some even older, were cleared for the High Capacity Bus Service (HCBS) corridors and road-widening. The needs of a "transport plan" to see the light of the day made the Delhi Government sacrifice its....