State-owned NTPC Ltd’s capacity addition target of 66,000 mega watt for the Twelfth Plan period could take a knocking as legal hurdles hold up the placement of equipment orders for key projects slated to come up over the next five years. The company has been unable to go ahead with the placement of equipment orders for four super-critical projects in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as its bulk tender floated in 2009 for the supply of 11 boilers and 11 turbines of 660 MW each has been stuck in court.

In an effort to boost tourism, Madhya Pradesh will convert seven government-owned forts and around 20 private heritage properties into hotels. The Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Department Corporation (MPSTDC) will invite private parties to invest in tourism infrastructure. At the first ever tourism conclave organised by MP Tourism and FICCI in Khajuraho last week, government and private stakeholders converged to discuss ways to attract tourists to the state.

India’s overall forest cover has declined by 367 sq-kms in the past two years despite a few states actually expanding their forest areas. The net loss is mainly on account of Naxalites destroying close to 200 sq-km of forests in Andhra Pradesh, a government report said in Tuesday. The country’s total forest cover now stands at 23.81 per cent of total geographical area.

In a decision that is likely to benefit rice farmers of West Bengal, an Empowered Group of Ministers headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday is learnt to have decided to allow foodgrain exports to Bangladesh through specified points across border. The decision is likely to benefit exporters by reducing transportation costs and also farmers from West Bengal, Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where private traders may source the foodgrain for export.

While the Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) has now been repopulated with translocated tigers and tigresses, the promised CBI probe into the disappearance of the entire population before 2009 is yet to be ordered even after the PMO’s intervention. Despite repeated reminders over the last five months, PTR’s field director R Sreenivasa Murthy has not sent evidence about three specific cases of poaching identified for a CBI probe to the headquarters in Bhopal.

China announced on Monday it will prohibit its airlines from paying European Union charges on carbon emissions, ratcheting up a global dispute over the cost of combating climate change. The charges are aimed at curbing emissions of climate-changing gases but governments including China, the US and Russia oppose them. Ratings agency Fitch warned in December the conflict could spiral into a global trade dispute. The Chinese air regulator said China’s carriers are barred from paying the charges or other fees without government permission, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Burning cowdung cakes can be 10 times more harmful than burning wood in poorly ventilated kitchens, something that can damage the lungs, a study comparing the two widely used kitchen fuels has found. Women who spend many hours cooking food in poorly ventilated homes can develop chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD), asthma, tuberculosis and lung cancer, says Dr Sundeep Salvi, director of Pune’s Chest Research Foundation. Exposure to biomass fuel smoke, he says, is a bigger risk factor for COPD than smoking.

At least 44 people, including school children, were killed Monday after a severe 6.8 magnitude quake hit the third-largest island in the Philippines causing buildings to collapse and shutting down power supply. The quake struck about 70 km from the coastal city of Dumaguete on the Philippine island of Negros, the US Geological Survey said. The dead included two elementary school children, authorities said, according to the Philippines News Agency. The girls died when walls at their schools collapsed on them, National Police spokesman Chief Supt. Agrimero Cruz Jr. said.

The Supreme Court on Monday issued notices to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Medical Council of India on a petition seeking judicial intervention into allegations of clinical trials of untested drugs being conducted on patients, mostly poor, without taking their prior “informed” consent. A PIL taken up before a Bench of Justices R M Lodha and H L Gokhale said these drug tests are prevalent because laws are not being implemented strictly by the government and its agencies, providing pharma companies with a loophole.

Work on the survey of land at Gorakhpur village — the site for Haryana’s first nuclear power plant — came to a halt on Monday after irate villagers held three engineers of a private company hostage for five hours. According to sources, the engineers of DBM Geo-Technology and Construction Company, working for the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, had gone to the village without taking the local administration into confidence. For the last six days, they had been collecting soil and water samples. Farmers are not ready to part with their land for the project.