Industry

SC gets strict with industrial units 

An aerospace engineer from IIT, Kharagpur, Siddharth Agarwal could have been drawing a fancy salary like any other 25-year-old if he hadn’t followed his passion.

Pranab Choudhury has been actively engaged with the causes of the poor and the environment for more than a decade.

Despite all the hype around Swachh Bharat Mission, the situation on the ground remains dismal. The city of Ujjain is located on the western part of Madhya Pradesh on the Malwa Plateau and is primarily a religious tourism centre due to the Mahakal temple.

It’s a battle that dates back to 1957. Two states of India--Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Odisha--have fought fiercely over the water of the Mahanadi they share. When Chhattisgarh was carved out of MP in 2000, it inherited both the Mahanadi and the conflict with Odisha over its water.

Hasdeo Arand illustrates all that is wrong with the coal mining industry today. This ancient and dense forest in Chattisgarh, inhabited by several tribes, was once famous for being an elephant corridor. Since 2013, the area has worn a different face.

In August 2016, the Karnataka government gave Abu Dhabi-based businessman B.R. Shetty permission to privatise the iconic Jog Falls to make it a perennial waterfall and to develop it into a tourism hotspot.

Women in Salmora area of Majuli, the world’s largest riverine island and India’s first island district, practise their traditional form of pottery--the one that does not use a wheel but is hand beaten to shape and uses a viscid kind of clay. As the Brahmaputra eats away huge swathes of land year after year, the clay that these potters use is being taken away by the river. 

The Mahanadi is the lifeline of the people of both Chhattisgarh and Odisha, as it the most important water source for the farmers and other citizens of both these states to meet their domestic and livelihood needs.