India Conservation

The water quality of Ganga river at Allahabad and Varanasi, two holy places where millions take a dip, is most unfit for bathing purposes... Water becomes unfit for bathing if the biochemical oxygen demand (BoD) level exceeds 3 mg per litre... the BoD level at Allahabad was 6.4, it was 3.4 at Varanasi, 4.5 at Kanpur and 3.9 at Kannauj, making the Ganga unfit for bathing, what to talk about drinking.” “The biggest culprit is domestic sewage. According to Indian government figures compiled by the Centre for Science and Environment, an advocacy group based in New Delhi, 2.7 million liters per day of sewage is generated by the 50 cities along its banks…. The same agency categorizes 764 ‘grossly polluted' factories, including chemical plants, slaughterhouses and textile factories. Additionally, the loss of freshwater flow into the river from hydroelectric dams and agricultural irrigation means that some stretches of the river receive no freshwater flow during winter and summer months – only wastewater… Sewage treatment plants have been built in cities all along the river, but many don't operate at full capacity because of a lack of electricity. Another problem is India's decentralized approach to governance.

A massive engineering scheme that would bring hundreds of dams to the Narmada River and have far-reaching impacts on millions of poor farmers is today one of the most controversial development issues in contemporary India, one that symbolizes the clash over who benefits from development and who pays for it. When construction started in 1988, it gave rise to one of the world's largest social movements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). The Government of India plans to build 30 large, 135 medium and 3,000 small dams and related water infrastructure to harness the waters of the Narmada and its tributaries. The proponents of these plans claim that the dams would provide large amounts of water and electricity. However, the construction of a number of hydropower and irrigation projects on the Narmada have already had major social and environmental costs and yielded far fewer benefits than expected.

India has established 166 national parks and 515 sanctuaries covering more 4.95% of the country's total surface area.

More money has been spent on tiger conservation than on preserving any other species in the world, yet wildlife biologists have been seemingly unable to stop the decline of the iconic big cat in the face of poaching and habitat loss. That appeared to change Tuesday, when the government of India—the country is home to most of the world's wild tigers—announced preliminary results of the latest tiger census that reveal a surge in the number of the big cats in its preserves over the past seven years. India's environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, announced that its scientists had counted 2,226 wild tigers in the country, up from 1,411 seven years ago, a rise of nearly 58 percent. The country now hosts about 70 percent of the world's wild tigers....

India has the top four most polluted cities in the world monitored by the World Health Organization. New Delhi's air pronounced number one.

Shiva's fiery opposition to globalization and to the use of genetically modified crops has made her a hero to anti-G.M.O. activists everywhere... She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive... Shiva, along with a growing army of supporters, argues that the prevailing model of industrial agriculture, heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, and a seemingly limitless supply of cheap water, places an unacceptable burden on the Earth's resources. She promotes, as most knowledgeable farmers do, more diversity in crops, greater care for the soil, and more support for people who work the land every day.... She has been called the Gandhi of grain and compared to Mother Teresa

India's power minister, Piyush Goyal “has promised to double India's use of domestic coal from 565 million tons last year to more than a billion tons by 2019, and he is trying to sell coal-mining licenses as swiftly as possible after years of delay . . . India's coal rush could push the world past the brink of irreversible climate change, with India among the worst affected, scientists say . . . India's coal is mostly of poor quality with a high ash content that makes it roughly twice as polluting as coal from the West. And while China gets 90 percent of its coal from underground mines, 90 percent of India's coal is from strip mines, which are far more environmentally costly. In a country three times more densely populated than China, India's mines and power plants directly affect millions of residents. Mercury poisoning has cursed generations of villagers in places like Bagesati, in Uttar Pradesh, with contorted bodies, decaying teeth and mental disorders.”

Eight governments created the South Asia Wildlife Enforcement Network to tackle illegal wildlife trade and poaching in the region.

Challa Krishnamurthy was an Indian organic farmer and anti-pollution advocate shot and killed for reporting and attempting to expose illegal waste disposal.

Singh is now known as the Rain Man of Rajastan, having brought water back to more than 1,000 villages and got water to flow again in all five major rivers in Rajastan. He has so far helped to build more than 8,600 johads and other structures to collect water for the dry seasons. The forest cover has increased by a third because the water table has risen, and antelope and leopard have returned to the region. It has also been one of the cheapest regenerations of a region ever known - in Rajastan, villages have been brought back to life sometimes for just a few hundred pounds, far less than the cost of the single borehole that almost destroyed them.

The Act strengthens the rights of forest-dwelling communities to land and other resources, that had otherwise been denied due to colonial laws in India.

The Tehri Dam the largest dam in India and one of the largest in the world. The dam has been been heavily protested due to environmental and social impacts, as well concerns about its ability to withstand an earthquake. Since the filling of the reservoir, flow of Bhagirathi water has changed from the normal 1,000 cubic feet per second (28 m3/s) to a mere 200 cubic feet per second (5.7 m3/s), and sometimes the river stops flowing altogether.

Biologists, wildlife lovers, social activists, and the public were united in their shock and indignation. After all, the tiger has been the prime flagship species for conservation in India since the 1970s when Project Tiger was initiated. In the aftermath of this revelation, most commentators attributed the tiger's local extinction in Sariska to poaching. However, biologists familiar with Sariska maintained that the tiger had been bound to disappear sooner or later, given the visible degradation of forests in the reserve and the fact that the tiger population had reached an all-time low at the time.

A series of natural disasters, including floods, landslides, earthquakes and tsunamis wreak havoc on southern coastal communities.