Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

Palwal is a small town on Delhi-Agra highway and one among many other small towns that are fast developing because these are now within commuting distance from Delhi city. So people can afford to continue to stay in these towns and leave their families there, while they go for a day’s job ... Full story

Sacrificing the enchanting Renuka Lake for giving more water to Delhi Delhi is the seat of power of the world’s largest democracy. It is also one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. A city of cities, this strategically located conurbation--with the last of the visible Aravalli Ridge on one side and river Yamuna on the other--has been the capital of many an Empires that ruled India and the Indian sub-continent from time to time. Delhi has also been tackling the impacts of climate change and like all major urban centers in the developing countries, the city is gearing up to meet the sustainability crisis. Delhi is witnessing a large-scale influx of rural population which is the result of both an ever increasing population trend and livelihood failure in rural India owing to floods, droughts and similar weather events which are fundamentally the consequence of a changing climate. This is putting a great pressure on the natural resources available to the city. The same have been depleting both quantitatively as well as qualitatively at a great pace. One particular resource, water--essential to sustain and maintain life--is most severely impacted owing to this ever increasing population as well as the now unpredicted flow in the Yamuna and other rivers upstream of it. At the same time, policies that are formulated without keeping the sustainability aspect in mind have also been contributing to Delhi’s water crisis. But the most striking feature of this crisis is that there is no crisis at all. Rather, the only crisis that exists is in planning and management. Full story

Thank you for taking out time to respond to the last blog and putting your mind to the real issue behind it. These encouraging comments provide the strength to keep on going and creating new possibilities in the area of environment and climate change adaptation. This week is special in Hindu calendar 15th of March was a special day. It marked the beginning of the summer ... Full story

Last week, Central Board of Secondary-school Certification Examinations (CBSE) began in Delhi and all over India. It is the first public examination for the children of 10th standard. This is the first among various other public exams that a child will face in her/his life. Almost all of us have gone through such a phase in ... Full story

Ever considered the question: how do we acquire knowledge about the physical environment around us? The easiest way to get to know about environment in general and environmental issues in particular is to open a text book. In our academic curriculum, in our schools ... Full story

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are to miss the future” ... Full story

Thank you for reading your blogs so carefully and with so much interest. It is what makes them available. But not every action everywhere are good. The context determines it. To recapitulate, ... Full story

The "world to word’ paradigm allows us to fix and manipulate the world in order to control and dominate it.  The environmental perceptions dictates clichés such as “the world we live in, we have borrowed from our children rather than inherited from our elders” or “earth has enough resources to meet all our needs but not enough to meet even one person’s greed.”  “Today’s solutions ... Full story

As human beings, we are born into a pre-existing world. Being born into a culture we inherit-words and language-we assume that words and languages describe this preexisting world. Because we think of language as something in response to the world or existing in order to deal with the world, language becomes a means to an end. It is a means to make sense of the ... Full story

The feedbacks you post are out of your willingness to ‘because in the matter’ of creating a better world through environmental actions. Thank you for taking time out to respond to the blog and sharing your lives with me. It is these little acts of patchwork that brings us together. Patchwork is a creative way of bringing different pieces of cloth to create a new ... Full story