May , 2008
The land of the dammed!
Is there any connection between saving the tiger and using less electricity? I didn't think so till I visited the land of the dammed! The North East is slated to be the powerhouse of the country. Over 200 mega and medium sized dams are to be built after cutting millions of trees and thousands of acres of forests. The irony only 12 per cent of the power generated from the dams is to be used locally the rest by big cities like Mumbai and Delhi. And I am keen to know how do the people of the North East feel about this. A flight from Delhi to Dibrugarh and then a ferry ride crossing the might Brahmputra into Arunachal Pradesh and I already feel like I have entered a different world. In Roeing town in Dibang valley there seem to be no people on the streets. I walk into....




More about Bahar Dutt
Bahar Dutt is a wildlife conservationist by training. She has worked for the last ten years on crucial wildlife conservation projects in India and abroad. In England she worked at the world famous Jersey Zoo set up by naturalist Gerald Durrell and was involved in assessing the conditions for release of endangered primate in the Amazon forests. . She has over 10 awards to her credit including the Ramnath Goenka Award in 2006 and the Wildscreen Award , UK and the Young Environment Journalist Award 2007. As an environment editor at CNN-IBN she has done a range of stories travelling to far and forgotten corners of this country to expose the nexus between the mining mafia, politicians and corporates. She has posed as a furniture maker to expose the illegal trade in banned timber in the Western Ghats, and the nexus between the police and a mining company in the Niyamgiri hills of Orissa. One of her most dramatic exposés involved a cement company of global dimensions that had been operating illegally in the forests of Meghalaya on the India-Bangladesh border. More recently, she and the CNN-IBN team exposed the operations of a miner in Goa who had illegally devastated forest lands. Their story led to the shut down of the mine.



Recent Posts
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- + On the uranium trail in Meghalaya's forests
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- + A River Gone Dead
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