Lights to go off for ‘Earth Hour’ tomorrow 27 March 2010 – 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm IST

Delhi Chief Mnister Sheila Dikshit and Bollywood actor Abhishek Bachchan at the launch of the campaign for Earth Hour 2010, in Delhi on on 27 March 2010, 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm IST.

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It’s time to plan for a candle light dinner on Saturday as Delhi will join other world cities in observing the ‘Earth Hour’ by turning off the lights for an hour on  27 March 2010 from 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm IST.

With almost 50 million supporters across the globe and a network in over 100 countries, the annual ‘Earth Hour’ initiative, organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature, has emerged as one of the largest global campaigns to combat climate change.

Pledging its support to the initiative, the city government has already started a campaign asking people to observe the event by switching off all the lights and electrical appliances for an hour on Saturday.

“I appeal to all the residents to observe the Earth Hour tomorrow. We have already launched a campaign to make the event a great success,” Delhi Environment Secretary Dharmendra told.

He said the government had already asked shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, educational institutions and major markets to observe the event which is celebrated across major cities of the world on the last Saturday of March annually to pledge support for protecting the environment.

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, herself a strong votary of eco-friendly measures, will participate in an event at the lawns of the India Gate and switch off the lights there at 8.30 pm IST.

“I can assure you that all the households can have romantic candle light dinners sitting at their homes on March 27,” Ms. Dikshit had said at a function organised by WWF here.

City Discoms BSES and NDPL have also pledged their support to the ‘Earth Hour’ initiative and appealed to their consumers to observe the event.

“On NDPL’s part we have undertaken a campaign for consumer sensitisation which includes putting up of posters, hoardings, banners at all customer touch points,” said an NDPL official.

Several hotels and malls have also announced their support to the initiative and plans to organise special events.

An official of the InterContinental Hotels Group said the hotel will encourage in-house guests to switch off lights in their rooms and join the ‘guestogether’ parties being hosted by them between 8.30 and 9.30 pm.

Hotel ‘Crowne Plaza Today’ in Gurgaon will turn off all the non-essential lights to mark the ‘Earth Hour’ and organise a candlelight dinner for their guests.

The WWF India said the event will also be celebrated in Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangaluru, Chennai and Kolkata, apart from several other cities where people will be urged to turn off the lights in their homes and offices for a hour.

It said Delhi and Mumbai will be leading the country in making the campaign a success in India. Both the cities had observed the event last year and saved a total of 1,000 MW of power.

Started in Sydney in Australia in 2007, the ‘Earth Hour’ had become a global event in 2008 with participation of 35 countries. India joined the Earth Hour campaign last year.

Delhi alone had saved 700 MW of power by supporting the campaign.

In 2009, millions of people took part in the third ‘Earth Hour’. Over 4,000 cities in 88 countries officially switched off lights to pledge their support for saving the planet.

New Delhi’s Yamuna River — a catastrophe in the making

A Drive to clean the polluted River Yamuna is in progress.

Methane gas is bubbling up from the black-coloured stew, and the water smells horrible.

The holy river Yamuna, once teeming with life, is practically dead, yet a homeless man is rinsing his mouth with the noxious liquid.

Under a nearby bridge, scavengers on a self-made raft are fishing out votive offerings that drivers throw from their cars to Yamuna, which is worshipped by Hindus as a goddess.

But it is people and politics that are choking Yamuna to death, and ecologists are warning of a looming environmental catastrophe as World Water Day approaches on March 22.

The river, New Delhi’s lifeline, is reputed to be India’s most polluted as well as one of the most toxic waterways worldwide.

The Yamuna provides an example of Indian government policies that are focused on economic growth, often at the cost of the environment.

In the meantime, the river is dying a slow yet unpublicized death, partly because it has mostly vanished from public sight behind concrete after the river was moved. A highway now runs along the old riverbed.

Access to the river is possible at only a few points and glimpses of it can be gained only from road or subway bridges.

Vimlendu K Jha, executive director of the environmental organization Swechha, estimates that 60 per cent of New Delhi’s 14 million people have never seen the river.

“How can you save the Yamuna if nobody ever sees it?” he asks.

The river is indeed rather beautiful — before it reaches New Delhi and is polluted with raw sewage and toxic waste.

Outside the capital, its waters are clear, birds are sailing above its surface and fishermen cast their nets.

But at this point of its course, most of the river’s waters are held back by an irrigation dam in the neighbouring state of Haryana in violation of federal agreements, which is one of the causes for the problems downstream.

The sluice gates let pass only a trickle, which is then “replenished” with human and industrial sewage as soon as the river reaches New Delhi.

Eighteen major sewage canals in the capital are emptying into the holy river, depleting it of its oxygen.

Authorities in New Delhi have assessed the water as so toxic that they have even prohibited cleaning animals with it. It may only be used to cool industrial machinery.

But the many homeless people living along its banks have no access to a regular tap water supply. They are forced to use the Yamuna’s waters to wash themselves and their clothes. Some even use it for cooking and drinking, according to Jha, because they had no alternative.

“For them, it is better to have unhealthy water than no water at all,” he says.

The Yamuna stretches for 1,370 kilometres, but only 22 kilometres of these flow through New Delhi. It is in this short stretch during which 80 per cent of its pollution is inflicted, Swechha says.

Another 9 per cent of the pollution is attributed to the city of Agra, home to the world-famous Taj Mahal, behind which the Yamuna passes.

The river eventually spills its toxic floods into India’s holiest river, the Ganges.

Although millions of dollars have been spent in recent years to revive the river, Jha said: “We don’t know where the money has gone.

The action plans were useless. Nothing happened. The river is your witness.” Instead, he claims, the pollution is increasing because most sewage treatment plants in New Delhi are not functioning properly.

The river still constitutes the capital’s most important source of drinking water, which is simply pumped from the river before it enters New Delhi. But its toxins also contaminate groundwater, another important drinking water source for the ever-growing metropolis.

“We are just waiting for a disaster to happen,” Jha warns.

“Everyone seems to be thinking the city is run by malls and the metro. It’s not.” That disaster might happen “when people start dying in a plague-like situation” in the capital because of their toxic drinking water, he says.

 

NDTV Greenathon raised: Rs 3 crore and counting

Join the second edition of the NDTV-Toyota Greenathon and help light up a billion lives.

Marathon Man Milind completes 100 km run
Chat Transcripts: Priyanka | Vikram Chandra
Lighting up lives  :  155 villages lit up so far
Donate here | Greenathon-1: A success story
What do you think will keep India green?
Videos: Catch all the Greenathon action here
Track what’s happening in your city here
Bid for paintings by Subodh Gupta, Paresh Maity
Celebrity tweets 
Call us on 1800-1036388, 011-46536388

More info ..>  http://Green.NDTV.Com

NDTV Greenathon, Marathon with Stars to Save Environment

Greenathon, a 24 hour live television fundraiser event to save the earth environment, begains on 6th march 2010 at 7pm on NDTV Channel.

Leading the movement are Campaign Ambassador, Priyanka Chopra and TERI’s Dr. R. K Pachauri & Chief Ministers from across India unite for the Greenathon.

NDTV Greenathon is back with its second edition to provide solar lanterns to villages that would otherwise be without electricity for a decade or more after lighting up over 55 villages in India through TERI’s Lighting a Billion Lives initiative.

Taking forward their nationwide Green Campaign to create environmental awareness, NDTV in association with Toyota, will telecast Greenathon.

Dr. R.K. Pachauri, Nobel-prize winner, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Director-General of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) will also give his green message to the citizens of the country.

The 24-hour programming will be hosted by Vikram Chandra and Cyrus Broacha. Priyanka Chopra, the campaign ambassador, will co-anchor the event to lend her support to the cause and urge people to do their bit for a greener tomorrow.

It’s the first of its kind green initiative for the environment. India’s first ever 24-hour live event, The Greenathon, will be telecast across all NDTV channels from March 6-7 to raise awareness about the environment and find ways to create a cleaner, greener & healthy.

Mumbai Runathon:- Marathon Man “Milind Soman” will run a 100 km in 24 hours to reinforce his commitment to the green cause.

Starting from Carter Road in Bandra on March 6th and ending at the Yash Raj Studios in Andheri, celebrities like Rahul Bose and Nikhil Chinappa will join Milind during the run.

Last year, the Marathon Man ran 60 km for the Greenathon and helped raise Rs 30 lakh for the campaign.

 

1.8 lakh Olive Ridleys turtles arrive on Orissa beach for nesting

KENDRAPARA (Orissa, INDIA): An estimated 1.8 lakh female Olive Ridley turtles have so far arrived en-masse to lay eggs, a unique natural phenomenon, at Gahirmatha marine sanctuary in Kendrapara district, officials said.

Since February 24 night the tranquil beaches on south eastern part of Nasi-2 island, close to Defence Research Development Organisation’s installation at the Wheeler’s Island, are teeming with turtles, Prasanna Kumar Behera, Divisional Forest Officer, Rajnagar Mangrove (Wildlife) forest division, said.

“The Olive Ridleys are literally invading the beach and are digging 2-3 feet deep pits to lay eggs. They covered the pits with sand after laying the eggs and loitered in the area for an hour or two before disappearing into the waves,” he said.

“With thousands of the turtles digging the pits at the same time, it created a soothing cacophony”, a forest official present at the site, said.

Net beats newspapers as news source: U.S. Study

Sixty-one percent Americans got at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent who listened to radio news and 50 per cent who read newspapers. (project smile india)

More Americans get their news from the internet than from either newspapers or radio. But television is still the most popular news source, according to a study released Monday.

The survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 61 percent of Americans got at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent who listened to radio news and 50 percent who read newspapers. Some 78 percent of respondents said they watched television news.

Most respondents mix and match for their news — with 92 percent saying they get their news from more than one source — combining social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook with radio, TV and newspapers, the report found.

Online users were younger than other news consumers. Some 37 per said they have contributed to the “creation” of news, commented on it online and shared or posted news on sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to the study.

Twenty-eight percent of online users customize their home pages to include news “from sources and on topics that particularly interest them,” the report found.

With 37 percent of cellphone owners using their mobile devices to get news, the report said that news was becoming “portable, personalized and participatory.” Online users tended to “forage widely” but regularly visited only a “handful of different sites,” the report’s authors said. Portals and news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News and AOL were popular, as were the sites of traditional news organizations such as the BBC, New York Times and CNN, the report said.

 

Why we fight with each other in the name of religion when there’s no religion teach us to fight………..?

Answerer 1
Islam does teach one to fight, and the Christian bible is at best ambiguous about fighting for religion. Incidentally, these two religions have been responsible for the vast majority of religious violence.
Answerer 2
I’m not fighting; people who choose to fight aren’t REAL Christians.
Answerer 3
Because we are not religious!
Answerer 4
Hmmm , cause bigots don’t actually believe in anything but forcing their own beliefs on others to share the happiness and greatness of their religion with others even through wars.
Plus , Islam teaches how to defend yourself even if it is through war . Practical , eh ?

PLEASE SEND YOUR COMMENTS ON THE SAME….

26 per cent of Americans get news via phone: survey

What An Idea Sir Ji 

Just over a quarter of American adults now read news on their cell phones, according to a new report.

The survey results offer another sign of how people are changing they way they get information. Technology has been reshaping the news business and the way consumers relate to it for more than a decade. The latest shift is being driven by the exploding popularity of phones that can easily access the Internet.

The new study found that 26 per cent of Americans get news on their phones. Pew doesn’t have comparable data for say, two or three years ago. But evidence of the shift in habits can be seen in this finding: Younger cell phone owners are more likely to look for news on their phones. About 43 per cent of those under 50 said they are mobile news consumers, compared with 15 per cent of older respondents.

Still, some things don’t change. Readers’ No. 1 concern when they look for news on their phones: the weather. Of the 37 per cent of cell phone owners who said they use the Internet on their phone, 72 per cent said they check weather reports. Current events came in second with 68 percent.

Pew’s survey offered a wide range of statistics on people’s news habits. It showed people are not relying on one medium. Just shy of 60 per cent of respondents get news from both online and offline sources. And 46 per cent said they use four to six different types of media on a typical day.

The Web is also helping to turn the news into more of a social experience: More than 80 percent of respondents get or receive news via e-mailed links.

The results were based on telephone interviews with 2,259 people over the age of 18, conducted between Dec. 28 and Jan. 19. For questions to that entire group, the margin of error was 2.3 percentage points. On questions to just Internet users, the margin was 2.7 percentage points.

 

Can I be green and surf the net?

Every time you go online you increase your carbon footprint. 

Is it possible to be a green surfer?

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  • Lucy Siegle
  • The Observer, Sunday 28 February 2010

Somewhere in California (and soon to be in India and possibly Iceland) there are vast tracts of hulking warehouses containing thousands of energy-guzzling web servers – it’s farming, but not as depicted in The Archers.

Server farms provide the network to transmit websites. They are powered by electricity, predominantly from coal-fired power stations. Add in the energy required to make your PC in the first place and computing is responsible for 1bn tonnes of CO₂ each year – more emissions than aviation. In pollution terms, using t’internet could be your equivalent of an Arkwright mill at full throttle during the Industrial Revolution.

Last month some headlines suggested that a Google search generated 7g of CO₂ – the same as making a cup of tea. This left the eco-minded home worker in a real quandary: I chose the cup of tea. Later Google corrected this to 0.2g per search. But still, it all adds up.

The latest research suggests that you create 20mg of CO₂ per second per visit to a website. The more whistles and bells on the site the higher this gets – up to 300mg of CO₂ per second for one with video content. Running an avatar in Second Life uses more electricity than a live person in Brazil. Ask yourself: is this watt necessary?

Employ a spam filter, too. In 2008 an estimated 62 trillion spam emails were sent globally, creating the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1m passenger cars.

I know what you’re thinking: what’s wrong with a reference book? Well, US academics remind us that driving a mile and back to the library produces 100 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a web search. Remaining ignorant is carbon free.