The anatomy of congestion
Travel today is relatively faster, and people across the world are travelling more than ever before. But at a giant cost: urban roads are choked …
ChevronTexaco on trial
October 21, 2003. High-level corporate lawyers from ChevronTexaco sit in the same packed muggy courtroom as bare-breasted Amazonian men and women …
Managing waste - the Chandigarh way
Le Corbusier's city is getting a face-lift. A unique programme of the Municipal Corporation, Chandigarh (MCC), is ridding the city of the most …
Parched Mumbai
The news is out: water levels in Mumbai are over 15 per cent less than last year. It might seem routine but it has the city up in arms. …
Industrial devil-ution
Maharashtra and Gujarat. The brightest jewels in India's industrial crown. But impressive industrial growth figures fail to hide the grim …
Chernobyl
Twenty years ago -- on April 26, 1986 -- the biggest nuclear disaster happened in Chernobyl, in what was then the Soviet Union, when a chain …
A Nationalised Nightmare
One of the main reasons given for nationalising the coalmines of India was to protect workers from accidents. What followed was large-scale …
Buttermilk - glass of better cheer
In the past, nothing went to waste in a homestead, including the liquid left after churning out butter from curd
Drumsticks for health
Every traditional Malayalee home has a tulsi plant in front of the house and a drumstick tree in the backyard. The drumstick tree (Moringa …
Housing Scheme
Hermit crabs aren't fussy creatures. Faced with a housing crunch, in many parts of the world, they have taken up abode in plastic and junk left …
How Australian aborigines read the weather
The Aboriginal people of Australia have been around for at least 50,000 years, overcoming the most adverse conditions. During this period they …
Win some, lose most
To find out what the Union Budget has in store for science and the environment, Down To Earth spoke to environmentalists and representatives …
The great divide
For the urban Indian, upwardly mobile on auto-power, livestock means products like milk and meat. For 75 per cent of India living in villages, it …
Meet Deben Bora
As field researchers will tell, you don't get up one fine morning and cut through an unknown forest in search of an elusive animal species. Even …
We are all the same
At first sight, two humans may seem to differ enormously. But looks can be misleading. Among animals, humans make up an unusual group. All humans …
Defiant
The Bilirangan Temple Sanctuary in Karnataka bristles with angry Soligas. Their sustenance denied, the tribals deliberate their next move
Fantastic workers of the terrain
About 4,000 years ago, people in Lothal showed us how best to integrate land and water management practices
Biocontrol Backfires
South American cane toads introduced into Australia to check sugarcane pests have become a menace
On a limb and a prayer
In Delhis not-too-fashionable areas, Sayantan Bera photographs musclemen who set sprains and fractures right
Breakdown
Government is sponsoring unsustainability at the cost of traditons which have sustained India
Mapping the subcontinent
In 2002, the Survey of India began a year-long programme which celebrated 200 years of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, a mammoth cross-country …
Rickshaw pullers get together
On January 5, 2003 hundreds of rickshaw pullers in Hyderabad got together to declare: "Protect our right on roads."
Succour for cancer patients
Many terminally ill cancer patients have found succour in the last stages of their life at this Shanti Avedna Ashram , set up in 1978 by …
Schooled in self-rule
What do tribal children living in Nagarhole National Park in Karnataka learn at school? Take pride in what they are, reports NITIN SETHI
The tribe that disappeared
For over five decades, the Durua tribe in Orissa was not recognised because of a mistake in the Centre's list of scheduled tribes made in 1951...