On a warm November afternoon, Parul Haldar balanced precariously on the bow of a small wooden dinghy, pulling in a long net flecked with fish from the swirling brown river.
Just behind her loomed the dense forest of the Sundarbans, where some 10,000 square km (6,213 sq miles) of tidal mangroves straddle India’s northeastern coastline and western Bangladesh and open into the Bay of Bengal.
Four years ago, her husband disappeared on a fishing trip deep inside the forest. Two fishermen with him saw his body being dragged into the undergrowth – one of a rising number of humans killed by tigers as they venture into the wild.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented stress on India’s urban public health infrastructure, underscoring the need for urban planning to account for increased demand for health amenities during crises. This paper evaluates the city of Mumbai’s 1991 and 2034 development plans and finds inherent infrastructural inadequacies. It calls on urban-policymakers to complement development plans with robust dynamic health strategies that consider technological advances and epidemiological changes. Public-private partnerships should be encouraged to overcome the challenges of funding and technology adoption in health planning.
Attribution: Sayli Udas-Mankikar, “Health Infrastructure Planning Amid COVID-19: The Case of Mumbai,”
ORF Issue Brief No. 435, January 2021, Observer Research Foundation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted two features of the Nepal-India economic relationship: Nepal’s ballooning trade deficit, and unrestricted cross-border movement of people of both countries. Attributing the trade deficit entirely to supply-side constraints is neither accurate nor conducive to the overall health of the relationship. This brief suggests ways towards more sustainable trade relations between India and Nepal, among them, India relaxing the non-tariff measures it imposes on Nepali goods, Nepal improving its quality testing infrastructure, and a revision to the bilateral trade treaty. The brief points to the economic and security hazards of a porous border and argues that regulating it will be in both countries’ long-term interest. It highlights the need for a resolution to the territorial disputes between the two, and strict non-interference by both in each other’s internal affairs.
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MUMBAI: The government’s focus on driving the adoption of cleaner energy sources for industries and households as well as the recent infrastructural developments in pipeline connectivity have set the stage for a secular growth period for city gas distribution companies in India over the coming years.
India wants to raise the contribution of natural gas to the overall energy basket of the country to 15 per cent by 2030 from around 6 per cent currently, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi looks to make the country a leader in the fight against climate change.
It is a well-established fact that gas scores over coal and oil when it comes to lower carbon emission, even though questions remain over its conflict with the overall theme of decarbonisation of the economy.