NGT directs protection of endangered species in IIT Madras

ALSO READ NGT dismisses plea towards ban on sale of firecrackers NGT lifts 10-yr-antique diesel vehicles ban in some parts of UP for three years Cannot impose whole ban on charcoal as gas: Govt to NGT NGT junks Centre plea to raise ban on 10-12 months-vintage diesel cars in Delhi-NCR NGT to take name on lifting production ban in NCR today span.P-content div id =div-gpt line-top: 0px; font-length: 0px; Chief Minister Mukul Sangma on Wednesday claimed that the National Green Tribunal (NGT) did no longer ban mining of coal but banned simplest unlawful coal mining in Meghalaya. Sangma maintained that coal ought to nevertheless be legally mined with the state-owned Meghalaya Mineral Development Corporation (MMDC) performing as an device to adjust mining activities inside the nation. The inexperienced courtroom had ordered an period in-between ban on rat-hollow coal mining in the nation considering that April 17 2014 after the All Dimasa Students Union and the Dima Hasao District Committee filed an application earlier than the tribunal alleging that the water of the Kopili river became turning acidic because of coal mining in the Jaintia Hills. The NGT has now not banned coal mining but handiest unlawful coal mining the Chief Minister said in his reply to a Calling Attention raised via suspended Congress legislator Pynshngain N. Syiem within the meeting. ...Illegal because the mining sports do no longer conform with the statutory laws bearing on surroundings protection and health components. Therefore a lot of these statutory necessities ought to be pondered in the mining plan and area before the NGT Sangma explained. Informing the House that the MMDC could act as an instrument to offer on the spot alleviation to coal miners the Chief Minister said: This device (MMDC) will supply immediate relief to our miners. The Corporation may also take all of the essential measures to prepare mining plan and in getting diverse clearances after you have mining hire from the significant government. Moreover he said the government roped inside the MMDC pending the relevant authorities invoking Para 12 A(b) of the Sixth Schedule to ensure provisions of the important laws associated with coal mining have been exempted in Meghalaya. Allaying fears over the ownership of coal mines Sangma said: There is want to be understood with complete clarity that MMDC is empowered by means of the mandate of a law to be utilised by the government to help human beings mine their coal which is not to be had for private miners. But the MMDC could take all necessary measures to put together a mining plan and in getting numerous clearances once you have a mining rent from the critical government he added. Mining sports can be finished in a very transparent way by using appointing Mine Developer-cum-Operator in a transparent bidding device via country wide bidding where we are able to get the nice of specialists to have clinical mining. Besides the mine owners will recognise the real cost of coal from their respective mines Sangma defined. In early October a petition changed into despatched to the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi about the latest segment of the Mumbai metro a 33.5km stretch that is presently below production. The petition claimed that the metro if built might breach the magnetic circuits of two Zoroastrian hearth temples for this reason diminishing their spiritual powers and unleashing dark forces . Signed by means of eleven 000 humans the petition concluded that the temples being residing colourful ... Intermediaries among God and mankind as they may be if those holy fires are defiled the backlash from nature will now not spare the ones responsible . The third segment of Mumbai s metro community will bypass below a number of the oldest swankiest and maximum built up enclaves of south Mumbai and could certainly tunnel near sacred Zoroastrian hearth temples and a properly invested with boon-granting powers. The dwindling Zoroastrian or Parsi community might range fewer than forty five 000 in Mumbai (and just fifty six 000 in all of India) of the metropolis s kind of 18 million residents. But they're a excessive-profile group and many of them have began to see Ashwini Bhide dealing with director of the Mumbai Metro Railway Corporation (MMRC) as an unlikely 5th horsewoman of the apocalypse. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Zoroastrian child in front of the knight statues carved right into a hearth temple in Mumbai on Parsi new year. Photograph: Divyakant Solanki/EPA Nor is it just Parsi clergymen fighting the metro. The mission faces the ire of environmentalists heritage activists and possibly most vocal of all in this most Indian of towns cricketers. Mumbai desperately needs its new metro to start to salvage its disastrously inadequate public delivery device. Today the majority of the load is borne through the colonial-era commuter train community which takes seven million passengers an afternoon seven instances its supposed ability. On 30 September 23 humans were killed in a stampede on a footbridge at Elphinstone Road a station grossly unwell-prepared to service the business towers which have risen above the former fabric district of Lower Parel. Would one risk building a metro line below a nuclear reactor? An imperial fireplace is some distance more delicately balanced Hanoz Mistry The first two stages were exceptionally uncontroversial. Phase 1 managed through the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority and a joint project among Reliance Infrastructure the French company Veolia and http://piqs.de/user/childstraintz/ the Maharashtra government is an 11.5km east-west improved railway that opened in 2013. Phase 2 is 40km multiplied suburban educate line this is currently half-constructed. Only the 1/3 segment is underground and only the 0.33 segment passes underneath South Bombay or SoBo a pampered district wherein tolerance for intrusive metro production is lower due to the fact so few of the rich citizens want to use it. The stakes for approval of this section however are high: it s a 3.6bn ( 2.7bn) partnership among the Indian government and the country of Maharashtra with loans from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and hefty contracts for Indian agencies in addition to Chinese and Turkish infrastructure giants. Bhide insists that the metro gained t damage the Parsi temples. At a assembly brokered by means of the country s chief minister between the metro government and a Parsi delegation that included the 2 clerics who put forward the petition Bhide pointed to authorities research that declared the development safe. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The aftermath of the Elphinstone Road stampede in September. Photograph: Hindustan Times via Getty Images We explained to them that the tunnel become going nowhere below the sanctum sanctorum she says. Even the wells from which water is drawn for ceremonies are appropriately remote from the alignment. Moreover they're embedded within the soil layer and there s a huge buffer among that and the tunnel which bores through the basalt rock underneath. Firoz Kotwal who presided for several a long http://www.dance.net/u/countertopzes time over the Wadia Atash Behram temple in query showed as an awful lot. The MMRC group convinced us with concrete proof that there has been no chance at all to the fireplace temple and the leader minister gave us a personal guarantee of safety. So the hue and cry is baseless Kotwal says. Neither Zoroastrianism nor its rituals are in any danger from the metro tunnel. Kotwal also says that the mystic circuits referred to in the petition are not part of the ancient texts of Zoroastrianism in its 6th-century incarnation but have been added by the nineteenth-century Kshnum cult. Nevertheless the idea has caught. And the minute you carry in religion the authorities additionally panics. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students marketing campaign to guard green belt land commandeered by the MMRC. Photograph: Hindustan Times via Getty Images The high priest of Zoroastrianism s holiest shrine (at Udvada in neighbouring Gujarat) and the network s consultant within the secular National Commission for Minorities is further involved that the petition is worry run amok. It is the paintings of a minuscule institution with not anything higher to do says Dastur Khurshed Dastur. How to deal with eccentric people with closed minds out to whip up a worry psychosis? The Parsi Times has devoted several problems to clearing up what it calls incorrect information concerning the 187-12 months-old temple such as pointing out that the MMRC certified that the temple become structurally sounder than maximum of its friends in Girgaon a congested retail district. (Eight-five of the 348 buildings surveyed by means of MMRC were identified as having structurally problems ranging from severe to very excessive .) But the petition diehards aren t letting up. What about religious integrity? Says Hanoz Mistry one of the signatories. An Atash Behram temple is a composite complete no longer simply the consecrated fire enthroned inside the sanctum sanctorum. There is not any such issue as safe distance. Would one take the hazard of constructing a metro line beneath a nuclear reactor despite the fact that the concerned engineers may deliver all styles of assurances on protection and structural stability? An Atash Padshah (imperial hearth) is some distance a ways more delicately and sensitively balanced and spiritually exalted. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hallowed floor Azad Maidan Mumbai. Photograph: Dinodia Photos/Alamy One compromise proposed with the aid of the delegation is to move the tunnel so that it passes simply out of doors foundations of the hearth temple wall. But that might just be the first of the metro s limitations. Public hysteria has grown across the concept that the metro s maw might swallow 20 cricket pitches from the public green of Azad Maidan equally hallowed ground to some sports lovers on this town. Public hysteria has grown across the idea that the metro s maw could swallow 20 cricket pitches from a public inexperienced The effective Maharashtra Cricket Association complained that the field could be lost to hundreds of gamers young and old. They also note that the Mumbai police have commandeered an additional patch to accommodate the institution of protesters these days evicted from their traditional rallying ground close to the government secretariat again because of the metro creation. Bhide argues the cricketers have the statistics incorrect. Only three.Five hectares of the 20 hectare inexperienced would be affected and that too simplest for the duration of production. The state s cricket affiliation has relocated some of these and staggered timings for play. There have also been controversies centred at the MMRC s commandeering of a 25-hectare tract of the green belt in the Aarey Milk Colony for a automobile depot challenged via the National Green Tribunal due to the fact that 3 a hundred thirty timber would be affected. And extra these days about inadequate soil-trying out on a stretch of tunnel beneath the historical past mile an area of grand stone mercantile buildings. In August a one-ton cornice fell off the JN Petit Library a 119-year-old neo-Gothic constructing that has been recognised by means of Unesco. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A tunnel uninteresting machine is decreased into the ground in September. Photograph: Hindustan Times through Getty Images Activists blamed the metro for the coincidence and in October the Bombay High Court issued a -month stay on metro construction paintings to enhance the Petit building. Several different homes in the meantime have developed cracks. It is tough to decide whether or not this has anything to do with the tunnelling: in contrast to Kolkata s hard smooth-soil situations which stymied the construction of India s first metro for years Mumbai is constructed on basalt rock and the metro will pass 25 metres underneath the floor. Story of cities #11: the reclamation of Mumbai from the sea and its humans? Read greater But the MMRC isn't assisting its purpose by means of dragging its ft over inquiries made below the Right to Information Act. Whatever the validity of the protests and risks tunnel vision is probably the larger enemy. The city will come to a standstill in a few years without the metro Bhide says. And phase 3 will nearly genuinely move ahead regardless of the talk: 14% of the civil work is complete 3 tunnel uninteresting machines have been lowered into the floor and every other six are prepared to go. Magnetic circuits and dark forces might put off final touch past the planned establishing date of 2021 however the existential query for the metro is while now not if: with 1.7 million commuters expected every day there's quite literally an excessive amount of using at the final results. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter Facebook and Instagram to enroll in the discussion and explore our archive right here