Anagha Speaks

Since the Climate Change negotiations at Copenhagen in December 2009 and the subsequent promises by India to reduce its carbon footprint, it looks like the Indian government seems to be keenly following it up through actions being initiated at the state level. In Maharashtra, the building and construction sector is slated to become one of the sectors which has been asked to pull up its "green" socks! In a state level meet in February 2010 at Mumbai, it was announced that the Government of Maharashtra may look at making Green Buildings mandatory in the state. It means that the local municipal bodies or the building development sanctioning authorities may have to look at modified Development Control Rules, which necessarily follow prescriptions of a Green Building Rating System. Today, in India there are a multitude of Green Building Rating Systems that are being voluntarily adopted by project developers. USGBC's LEED, LEED India, IGBC Green Homes, Eco Housing and TERI GRIH...

Since the past two days I have been interacting with people talking about the Copenhagen Conference to be held in December 2009. Its quite interesting, I thought, that the media has made the jargon accessible and I find words like Climate Change and even Kyoto Protocol being used everywhere. After hearing these words being mouthed by some most improbable people, I was motivated enough to look up the Copenhagen Conference. And here I am sharing a few snippets of information that I managed to garner. Here goes.... What is it that the world is looking forward to from the Copenhagen Conference? Though, quite ambitious in itself, this conference 'merely' aims to bring clarity on the action towards Climate Change that the major economies of the world will take up. This is what the UN Exec Secretary of (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Mr Yvo de Boer aims to achieve at the least. He speaks about bringing clarity on four essentials for collective Interna...

A few days back, I and my students had a chance to interact with a Nuclear Physicist. The pertinent question that all of us had on our minds and came out in our discussions was Would Nuclear Power mean a boon or a curse for India? Nuclear Power is amazing! In a nutshell, it takes just a little radioactive substance to be 'processed' in a Nuclear Power reactor and the whole substance with its looooong half life, takes its own sweet time to divide itself into smaller and smaller particles, producing large amounts of heat and thereby power for India. Sounds simple, isn't it? However its not so! The underlying political, administrative and technical processes finally will define how the nuclear power gets generatedand used. The N-Deal that was publicized by the media and politically negotiated by our Prime Minister simply states that we can now import Nuclear fuel for power generation in our country. The technical negotiations will now begin to fire up existing nuclear reactors...