Lower the din - Aircraft noise a Pain for Residents around Airport
Aircraft noise a pain for residents around airport
Sahil yaduvanshi, 4, loves airplanes. He does not have to go far to look at one. He just has to peer out of his play school window and look up every few minutes to see one. “This is Cattie…,” he shouts out to his friend Pushpesh as he looks out. Sahil enjoys the sight of the planes, and wants to become a pilot when he grows up. His only complaint is to do with the roar of the planes. “I cannot hear my teacher and my friends because of the noise,” Sahil said. He studies in Aadyant pre-school in Vasant Kunj in Delhi. Most of his friends find it difficult to concentrate after a third runway—Runway 29—became operational at the Indira Gandhi airport in September 2008. “The children get disoriented as there is an airplane flying by every few minutes. We have to repeat lessons and even raise our voices to be heard,” said Bhavina Bembi, a school counsellor. Continue reading »
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Who’s encroaching? Noida eyes the Yamuna floodplain
Noida eyes the Yamuna floodplain
About 1,000 migrants lost their livelihood when their huts and crops on the Yamuna floodplain near the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border were razed in December. The Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department carried out the operation on a 25-hectare (ha) patch of the floodplain at Nayabaans village in Noida so that it can transfer the land to Noida for development.
The settlers were from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. They grew vegetables, flowers, wheat and rice on the land rented from people who once held land lease given by the irrigation department. Pappu of Kaimur district in Bihar had rented about 6 ha at Nayabaans close to the Okhla Bird Park and DND flyway for Rs 6,000 per hectare for a year. While he farmed, his younger siblings studied in a makeshift school. He lost his month-old vegetable crop and has nowhere to go.
“They just came in the evening and trampled all over the vegetables and flooded the fields. Had they at least given us a notice we would not have sown crops. I had invested Rs 15,000-20,000 on wheat.”
said Sauraj Singh Kashyap of Hapur in Uttar Pradesh. H C Malhotra, a member of literacy organization Gyan Jyoti Vidyalaya, which set up the makeshift school in the area, said “These people have not made permanent structures on the riverbed. They were merely making a living out of agriculture.” Continue reading »
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Just a Lament - Pollution in Yamuna
Biking along the Yamuna from Delhi to Agra, Ravleen Kaur hears constant calls for saving the river, but witnesses little action. Photographs by Vaibhav Raghunandan.
The roaring of motorcycles shattered the early morning calm on the Yamuna floodplains in Delhi. On World Environment Day on June 5, a group of professionals, farmers, activists and journalists gathered for a bike rally along the river at the Yamuna Satyagraha site, where a bunch of farmers and activists have been campaigning against the construction of the Commonwealth Games Village on the riverbed for over 300 days.
As the river drifted into Faridabad its burden of sewage and industrial waste kept on increasing and the spectacular failure of the Yamuna Action Plan began to unfold.
In Dhadhasiya, 40 km from Delhi, a sewage treatment plant (stp) of 20 million litre per day capacity sprawled over 7 hectares made a great showpiece of the plan, but it was shut down for upgradation. Untreated sewage was being discharged into the river. “Who is interested in knowing where their daily muck is going?” said the stp contractor with a shrug. Even when the plant functions, it treats the sewage only partially. In not even one place we visited, stps were functional. Continue reading »
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15 Rules Of Life In Delhi
Today I got this interesting mail from one of my friends with 15 Rules about Living Life in Delhi.
Delhi is known for its multi-ethnic culture. Anyone can survive in Delhi by hard or easy way.
- The Other Side Law:
If my side of the road has a traffic jam, then I can start driving on
the wrong side of the road, and all incoming cars will be rerouted via
Meerut. - The Queue Nahin Rule:
If there is a queue of many people, no one will notice me sneaking
into the front as long as I am looking the other way. - The Mind Over Matter Law:
If a red light is not working, four cars from different directions can
easily pass through one another. - The Auto Axiom:
If I indicate which way I am going to turn my auto rickshaw, it is an
information security leak. - The In Spit Of Thing:
The more I lean out of my car or
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Biometric Data to keep tap on Beggars
At the end of a daylong futile search for job, Mohammad Javed made his way to a temple in Old Delhi’s Meena Bazaar in the hope of getting some prasad. Little did he suspect a ‘raiding squad’ swooping down on him and bundling him off to Sewa Kuteer, a beggars’ home at Kingsway Camp. “I do not beg. I came here to work. But when there is no work we go to the temple to take the prasad. And if somebody gives a little money I don’t mind taking it, but I don’t ask for it,’ pleads the 26-year-old, who ran away from home in Sultanganj, Patna, six years ago. Javed will probably escape punishment for ‘begging’ this time but his data has been entered into a biometric identification system, which means he has been tagged a beggar by the government for the rest of his life.
At Kingsway Camp an experiment is under way. Delhi’s Department of Social Welfare (DSW) has installed a biometric machine at its classification centre there. It records the picture, fingerprint and the height of the person brought there by the department’s raiding squads, besides his/her address, begging history and health record. The system is part of a grand plan to rid the city of beggars by the 2010 Commonwealth Games. “We have increased the pace of raids. In 2005, we caught 1,000, while the number went up by 475 in 2006. In 2007, we apprehended 2,533; target is 5,000,’ says a DSW official. Continue reading »
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Econoburette: Easier way to Conduct Titration
Many a student nightmare originates in chemistry labs. Titration is one of them. It may be a big word but it’s a simple process to detect a solution’s potency. It requires sucking in acid through a pipette (a thin glass tube) to measure it.
A measured amount of a solution of an unknown concentration is added to a known volume of a second solution. There is an indicator to show when the reaction is complete and then the concentration of the unknown solution is calculated. This causes problems because students trying out the experiment end up gulping in the acid.
“When it is swallowed, the mouth becomes dry and it seems that the teeth will chip off. Teachers just ask us to spit out the acid and wash the mouth. I wish there were other ways to carry out the experiment,’ says Aparajita Tiwari, a class 12 student of Delhi Public School, Noida. A student from Kerala, Bright E S, says, “When one takes 10 ml of acid in a 12 ml capacity tube, chances of swallowing it are high.’ Continue reading »
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