THE ASIAN BROWN CLOUD

The Asian brown cloud is a layer of air pollution that covers parts of South Asia, namely the northern Indian Ocean, India, and Pakistan. Viewed from satellite photos, the cloud appears as a giant brown stain hanging in the air over much of South Asia and the Indian Ocean every year between January and March, possibly also during earlier and later months. The term was coined in reports from the UNEP Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX). In some humidity conditions, it forms haze. It is created by a range of airborne particles and pollutants from combustion (e.g. woodfires, cars, and factories), biomass burning and industrial processes with incomplete burning. The cloud is associated with the winter monsoon (November/December to April) during which there is no rain to wash pollutants from the air.

GREEN INDIA 2047 TERI - The Energy Research Institute launched the GREEN India 2047 project on the Earth Day, 1995. The purpose of that effort was to assess what India had done to its natural resource wealth in the first 50 years of Independence. The first phase of this project was completed before Independence Day 1997, and a presentation made to the then Prime Minister Shri I K Gujral and several of his cabinet colleagues. Subsequent phases of this work revealed that while India had progressed economically, our record as a society in ensuring the conservation and proper care of the environment and natural resources had been less than satisfactory. It was also found that environmental protection is not merely a luxury or the pursuit of a dream in the eyes of idealistic environmentalists. TERI .New Delhi Director-General noted environmentalist R.K.Pachauri.
FOURTH OF INDIA TURNING INTO DESERT: ISRO
 No less than a fourth of India’s geographical area, or 81 million hectares, is undergoing a process of desertification, reveals a first-of-its-kind ‘desertification status map’ of the country created by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in collaboration with several scientific institutions across the country.
 A host of reasons are responsible for this phenomenon, including changes in rainfall pattern and over-exploitation of natural resources. The spatial inventory, which uses satellite imagery from an Indian Remote Sensing Satellite, Resourcesat, also reveals that a third of the country’s area (or 105.48 million hectares) is degraded.
 At least eight processes were at work, of which water erosion is the most pronounced (affecting 10.21 per cent of the total geographical area), followed by reducing vegetation cover (9.63 per cent) and wind erosion (5.34 per cent). Together 32.07 per cent of the total geographic area is being transformed by land degradation.
 State-wise, Rajasthan has the largest area (21.77 per cent of the total geographical area) undergoing land degradation, followed by
 Jammu and Kashmir (12.79 per cent),
 Maharashtra (12.66 per cent) and
 Gujarat (12.72 per cent).
 ISRO’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad served as the nodal coordinating organisation for the study.
 The research paper adds that about 15.8 per cent of the country’s geographical area is arid, 37.6 per cent semi-arid and 16.5 per cent falls in the dry sub-humid region. Put together, about 228 million hectares, or 69 per cent of the country constitute ‘dry land.’