Millions of Indians are facing a new health risk. Increasing water scarcity is forcing farmers to grow vegetables and fodder using untreated sewage waste water across urban and rural cities.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FAAI) has in the past issued several warnings on pesticide residues and crop contaminants, including aflatoxins, patulin and ochratoxin in Indian fruit and vegetables. These pesticides are known to adversely effect the nervous system and can result in lung damage and cancer

Reliance Infrastructure has given an assurance to the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) that low hanging power lines that had resulted in the electrocution of 99 elephants in Orissa will be improved upon. A meeting to this effect was held last week in New Delhi and was attended by officials from the discom, MoEF, Orissa state government, the Wildlife Society of Orissa and the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

The Naxalites are expanding their tentacles into the tiger territory. Thirty per cent of India’s tiger reserves are already under their control.

Indian forest officials, from the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, present at the Global Tiger Recovery Programme (GTRP), complained of increasing Naxal infiltration in India’s heartland. The tiger reserves comprising Valmiki in Bihar, Palamau in Jharkhand, Indravati in Chhattisgarh, Buxa in West Bengal and Simplipal in Orissa are some of the reserves bearing the brunt of the Naxal menace.

India needs to take lessons from the killing of rhinos in South Africa in order to take pre-emptive lessons in protecting its tigers.

Three rhinos are being killed every day in South Africa for their horns, which outrival the price of gold in the black market. Rhino poaching is being carried out by sophisticated criminal syndicates who are smuggling these horns to Asia.

Despite the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) having green signaled the `300-crore Project Cheetah, which involved translocating African cheetahs from Namibia to Palpur Kuno Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, environment minister Jayanti Natarajan is not willing to commit herself on this project.

Project Tiger is not the great success story that the government would have you believe. India has lost 32 tigers in the last four months with two tigers having being killed last month in Tadoba Tiger Reserve by poachers using iron foot-traps.

Fourteen of these tigers have been lost to poachers till May 2012, minister for environment and forests Jayanthi Natarajan told reporters on the sidelines of the first stocktaking meeting to review the implementation of the Global Tiger Recovery Programme. “The remaining 18 tigers died natural deaths and we are constantly looking into reasons for this,” the minister said.

Minister for water resources Pawan Kumar Bansal is reported to have been horrified to have learnt of the macabre incident in which a mother, Qadeeran, and her youngest son, Rasheed, were killed by her two elder sons, Nafees and Anees, over a water dispute in Banda district of Bundelkhand.

Plunging groundwater levels would have only served to accelerate the situation but Mr Bansal is reported to have confided to close aides that even he was shocked that a water dispute would result in “matricide and fratricide”.

In the run-up to next month’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference in Brazil, the UN Asia-Pacific Human Development Report takes a hard look at how an extremely dynamic region can build rural resilience and create cities that can adapt to climate change.

The study also determined that 'in terms of total population', the largest city by 2020 is likely to be Tokyo with 37 million people, followed by New Delhi with 26 million. The report argues that in the face of climate change, Asia-Pacific nations 'will need to move to greener, more resilient, lower-emission options that not only sustain the environment but also offer opportunities to the poor'.

Is the Asia-Pacific region set to bear the onerous title of having become the disaster centre of the globe? So it would seem if one went by UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Development Report “One Planet to Share — Sustaining Human Progress in a Changing Climate”.

Climate-related disasters are on the rise and during the last two decades, 45 per cent of the world’s natural disasters, whether it be floods in Pakistan in 2010 or Cyclone Nargis which hit Burma in 2008, have occurred here, resulting in numerous deaths, massive human dislocations and severe economic losses.

Rising temperatures are going to hit India hard and by the end of the century the mean temperature rise is expected to be between 3.5 and 4.3 degrees Celsius. This is bound to have a deleterious effect on wheat production and will also see a major increase in cases of malaria.

These are but a few of the alarming submissions made in India’s National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) covering a wide variety of sectors including water, agriculture, forestry, natural ecosystems, coastal regions and human health between 1961-2098 by using computer-generated models in which over 2,000 scientists provided inputs.