Continuing the debate on the river linking proposal of the Government of India, a Kathmandu-based water engineer-turned-social auditor examines the history of the emergence of the hydraulic technocracy in the Subcontinent and the principles on which it operates.
From politicians to policy-makers and intellectuals to bureaucrats in Nepal, the news of Enron's arrival could not have come at a better time. In 1995 the World Bank,
I do not remember how I received India's first State of Environment Report published by the Centre for Science and Environment. Going through the content of the report,
The initialling of the treaty, the circumstances that preceded, attended and followed it, its ratification followed by nearly immediate descent into disgrace and the limbo it has since lapsed into
Three books on behalf of those waylaid by certain notions of progress, which see it as the monopoly sector of the state and the playground of the market.
(The Dispossessed:
India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium
by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam with Y.R. Rajan
Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1998
pp xvi+312, INR 395
Why build high dams if you're going to waste water and electricity?
On 5 and 6 April 1997, six hundred activists from all over Bihar and various parts
Harnessing all of Nepal´s hydropower resource would require the building of about 60 run-of-river power plants and 30 reservoir/dam projects in the middle hills. The construction of the
To cure Kathmandu Valley´s self-induced drought, planners have often looked to fresh-water sources beyond the Valley rim. A "pre-feasibiliry study" of out-of-Valley water projects was completed by
Planners were perturbed enough when Kathmandu Valley´s population growth rate was thought to be 4.8 per cent a year. Recently released data shows that the figure is more
