Railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal conceded that the Indian Railways has mowed down 49 elephants on railway tracks since 2010.

The lion’s share of the budgetary allocation for wildlife is cornered every year by Project Tiger which receives an annual budgetary allocation of approximately `200 crore. The next species to receive a separate allocation, (undoubtedly much smaller) is Project Elephant which receives around `22 crore in 2012.

Environment has been given short shrift in the budget with finance minister P. Chidambaram concerning himself only with the thousands of tons of garbage being generated in our cities everyday.

India imports 3,50,000 tonnes of white crystalline ammonium nitrate (AN), which is considered an extremely popular fertiliser by the Indian farming community. Since it is freely available over the counter, the last decade has seen it gain popularity with militant groups having used it in the Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Varanasi and, most recently, in the Hyderabad blasts.

Taking the wind out of the Department of Atomic Energy’s (DAE) assertions in the field of nuclear energy, M.V. Ramana, a nuclear physicist working in Princeton University, claimed there was little likelihood of any major expansion taking place in this area given the fact that India’s nuclear programme had run into several obstacles, including cost over runs (at over 200 per cent) and complete lack of accountability.

Attero Recycling, India’s sole integrated recycling company for e-waste, has hit upon a novel method of teaching the local kabariwallahs how to handle hazardous waste.

The multi-million ship-breaking industry has one of the highest accident rates (2/1,000) in the world making it worse than even the mining industry.

With China having given the go-ahead to the construction of three more dams on the Brahmaputra river in Tibet, India too has fast-tracked the construction of 200 mega and small dams in the Brahmaputra

Even after a sharp upsurge in swine flu cases north India, the death of 34-year old Manish Kapoor in the Org Central Hospital and Research Hospital (Org) in Faridabad has raised the critical questions as to how private hospitals still do not know to respond to this illness.

Poachers in Assam have switched over to using sophisticated AK-47 assault rifles to gun down one-horned rhinos. Already, nine rhinos have been shot down in the last couple of weeks forcing environment minister Jayanti Natarajan to make a flying visit to Assam.