Cyclone Hudhud has struck the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha at a speed of 195 kmph, bringing with it heavy rain and winds. The cyclone has caused severe damage to Visakhapatnam and has claimed 21 lives in Andhra Pradesh. Over 4 lakh people have been evacuated; 2.5 lakh in Andhra and 1.6 lakh in Odisha. The Andhra Chief Minister has asked PM Modi to declare it a national level disaster.
The Water Resources Minister has ordered all the polluting industries along the Ganga to set up sensor-based real-time online effluent monitoring systems by March 31, 2015 or else face the consequences of inaction. However, according to a recent report by the Central Pollution Control Board, municipal discharge is the main culprit behind Ganga pollution. The Minister has announced that it will take three years to prepare the short, medium and long term clean up plan for the Ganga.
The mangroves in Thane, Raigad, Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts of Maharashtra are yet to be notified as 'reserved forests', even when the Bombay High Court had ordered the notification of mangroves on Government land nine years back. Moreover, in Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts, officials have reported only 50% of the proposed mangrove area for notification, post-groundtruthing and have blamed satellite maps for the error.
Despite a decade old mandate, only 56,000 Government buildings have functional rainwater harvesting structures out of the 2.6 lakh buildings in the state. The least compliant department includes Government-run schools and colleges and anganwadi centres. The state, which was the first in the country to make rainwater harvesting mandatory, now has 30 out of the 32 districts where the water tables have fallen considerably in the last few years.
The Gangetic River Dolphin conservation project proposed by Aaranyak, a bio-diversity conservation organization and an IUCN member based in Guwahati, Assam, has been voted the best in a global online public voting competition organised by the European Outdoor Conservation Association. The project that aims for habitat restoration activities in 30 most important dolphin habitats in the Brahmaputra river, has won the competition with 4736 public votes ahead of UK’s Shark and Peru’s Manta Ray project.
This is a weekly roundup of important news from October 7-13, 2014. Also read last week's policy matters updates.
Lead image source: NASA WorldView via Wikipedia.