Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
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Lt Gen (retd) DS Hooda’s strong comment against the “constant hype” around military operations prompted a sharp attack on the government from the Congress. Rahul Gandhi complimented the retired army officer in a tweet but packed in a stinging jab at PM Modi as well.
In his tweet, Rahul Gandhi lauded Lt Gen Hooda’s comments. “Spoken like a true soldier General. India is so proud of you,” he tweeted.(HT File Photo)
A former Army commander’s strong comment against the “constant hype” around military operations prompted a sharp attack on the government from the Congress. Party president Rahul Gandhi complimented the retired army officer for his stand in a tweet but packed in a stinging jab at Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well.
Lt Gen (retd) DS Hooda, the retired officer who disapproved the hype, was the Northern Army Commander in September 2016 when commandos crossed the line of control to destroy terror camps in Pakistan.
“Mr 36 [sic] has absolutely no shame in using our military as a personal asset. He used the surgical strikes for political capital and the Rafale deal to increase Anil Ambani’s real capital by 30,000 Cr,” Referring to Lt Gen Hooda’s comments, Rahul Gandhi on Saturday tweeted.
While moderating a discussion on “Role of cross-border operations and surgical strikes” on Day 1 of the Military Literature Festival, Lt Gen Hooda had said, “The military leadership must guard against becoming a tool in the hands of politicians. We can’t take military action to suit someone politically,” he said. The excess hype, he admitted, didn’t help. “There were selective leaks to the media, and too much political banter around it.”
In his tweet, Rahul Gandhi lauded Lt Gen Hooda’s comments. “Spoken like a true soldier General. India is so proud of you,” he tweeted.
Speaking about Lt Gen Hooda’s comments, Army chief Bipin Rawat said, “These are an individual person’s perceptions, so let’s not comment on them. He was one of the main persons involved in conduct of these operations, so I respect his words very much.”
GOC Northern Command, Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, said, “Surgical strike is one of the options available to Army. It had a positive effect on country, we’ve been able to curb terrorism to a great extent.”
The army’s surgical strikes in the early hours of September 29, 2016 was a response to an attack on an army base in Kashmir’s Uri on September 18 in which 19 soldiers were killed. India blames the attack on militants who crossed over from Pakistani territory.
Image copyrightMANSI THAPLIYALImage captionAtmabodhanand, 26, stopped taking food on 24 October
Over the past two decades, holy men in India have gone on dozens of fasts demanding governments honour their promise to revive the polluted Ganges, a river revered by Hindus. The recent death of one of the most prominent hunger strikers made headlines. Soutik Biswas went to find out more.
In a quiet ashram (retreat) near the pilgrim town of Haridwar, a young seer says he would die to save the Ganges.
Atmabodhanand is on the 40th day of a fast begun after the ashram’s most prominent resident starved himself to death two months ago.
The 26-year-old computer science dropout from Kerala state spends his days lying under a blanket on a bed beneath a mango tree. When night falls and the air gets chillier, he moves inside the spartan quarters and sleeps.
“I am ready to die,” he told me. “Our ashram has a history of sacrifice.”
Matri Sadan is a leafy, three-acre ashram that sits on the edge of the river. Atmabodhanand stopped taking food on 24 October and now survives on water, salt and honey – his is the 60th such fast by residents since it was founded in 1997.
Using a mix of folksy activism and hunger strikes, residents have put pressure on successive governments to scrap big dams, ban sand mining, clean up the river and pass laws to protect it. Many governments have acceded to their demands in the past.
Image captionThe Ganges is the longest river in India
Seven years ago Swami Nigamanand, 36, fell into a coma and died after refusing food for 115 days – the longest hunger strike in the ashram’s history. He had demanded the government halt all stone quarrying near the river.
A 39-year-old local seer and ashram resident, Sant Gopal Das, is currently being force fed in hospital to keep him alive.
But it was the death in October of GD Agarwal, an 86-year-old former environmental engineer, that grabbed international headlines. Agarwal, also known as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand, died after fasting for 111 days at the ashram.
Agarwal was an alumnus of University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the elite Indian Institute of Technology. He worked as an engineer with the federal pollution control authority and was a vocal critic of the government’s half-hearted efforts at cleaning up the river. In 2011, he renounced the material world and became a seer. Before his death he wrote three letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his demands . He didn’t receive an answer.
“He was an inspiration to us all to do the best, and be our best, in all that we do,” Mary Stacey of the University of California wrote to the ashram after his death.
Two days after Agarwal began refusing water, his condition deteriorated and he died after being forcibly moved to the hospital. Within two weeks, Atmabodhanand took up the cudgels and began his hunger strike, inspired by his famous predecessor. He also believes that one man’s hunger can “bring back the river from the dead”.
Image captionEnvironmentalist GD Agarwal died in October after a 111-day-long hunger strike
The longest Indian river, Ganges flows from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. Concerns over the declining water levels and waning health of the 2,500km (1,553-mile)-long river, which supports a quarter of India’s 1.3 billion people, have been mounting for years.
Hindus revere the river as a god, and believe that bathing in her waters can wash away a person’s sins.
But the Ganges has been choked by more than 1,000 irrigation dams, the water table in its basin shrunk by reckless extraction of groundwater and its own water poisoned by toxic industrial effluent and household sewage. The river in Haridwar itself caught fire in 1984 when someone put a lit match on the water. “Indians are killing the Ganges with pollution and the polluted Ganges, in turn, is killing Indians,” says Victor Mallet, author of River of Life, River of Death, a new book on the river.
Now, say the seers at the ashram, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government, which rode to power in 2014 promising to clean up the Ganges, is “arrogant and isn’t interested in saving the river”.
They find it ironical that despite Agarwal being close to a Hindu nationalist organisation, he actually appeared to be listened to more by the previous Congress government. He fasted eight times while it was in power, and extracted some major concessions, including scrapping a dam and declaring a key 100km stretch of the river as sensitive.
“We will die for the river. If the government wants blood, we will give them blood,” says Swami Shivanand, the 72-year-old head of the ashram, who has also fasted in the past.
Image captionThe Ganges is one of the world’s most polluted rivers
Five years ago, Atmabodhanand quit college and travelled from Kerala in the south to Haridwar in northern Uttarakhand state by train, bus and foot. Seeking a life of renunciation, he says he was disillusioned by the way most holy men lived, and decided to end his life by disappearing into the Himalayas.
That is when he met Swami Shivanand who took him in. At the ashram he immersed himself in prayers and other activities and ran its social media accounts.
Atmabodhanand has gone on eight hunger strikes since 2014. During his longest fast, which lasted 47 days, he had hypothermia – when the body loses heat faster than it can produce it – and had to be taken to hospital. He has protested against sand mining on the river and stone crushing on its banks, and ended his strikes, he says, after authorities listened to the demands and took steps.
“This time, it is a fight to the finish. It’s going to be a long haul,” he says.
On the day I visited the ashram, rattled authorities, panicky at the prospect of another hunger death on the premises, sent doctors with an ambulance to check Atmabodhanand and take blood and urine samples to test for blood sugar, malaria and dengue. His blood pressure was normal, and he had no fever.
They updated his medical records in a government log book called Medical Examination of Hunger Strikers. All this while, residents chided the officials and accused them of trying to take away the hunger striker to “poison” him in hospital. The officials wondered aloud what they would gain by “killing a hunger striker”.
Hunger as a form of political protest is not new to India – Gandhi is arguably the most famous hunger striker in history, having resorted to more than a dozen fasts, the longest one lasting 21 days.
Image captionAtmabodhanand lies on a bed under a tree in the ashram during the day
Much later, in 2011, anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare undertook a high-profile 12-day hunger strike to press for anti-corruption laws. But what makes the fasts at the ashram in Haridwar stand out are their frequency and the two deaths. “Hunger strikers believe that the voice of hunger has a power disproportionate to its source,” says Prof Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History. “Hunger can strengthen the weak, inspire the timid, bully the powerful.”
But the lack of widespread public support for the fasting residents of Matri Sadan is sometimes glaring. “People have become selfish. They don’t care about their own good any more,” says Atmabodhanand feebly.
Himanshu Thakkar, a water expert with the advocacy group South Asian Network on Dams, says the hunger strikes by the seers at Matri Sadan have had “some impact” all right. Sand mining on the river has been stopped from time to time, and stone crushing factories removed from near the river. “But my impression is fasting must be a part of a larger strategy in which people from different sections of society must be mobilised.”
Image captionSwami Punyanand is on a fruits only diet to prepare for a future hunger strike
The BJP’s water resources minister Nitin Gadkari says a $3bn plan involving 254 projects to clean up the river and its surroundings is in progress, and most of the cleaning work of the river will be completed by next year. “The people’s dream of a rejuvenated Ganges will soon be fulfilled,” he told a meeting in Delhi recently.
But the seers insist the government is not doing enough. So hunger remains a constant companion of the residents at the retreat.
“I am next in the queue. This time, we will not stop,” says Swami Punyanand, a 61-year-old former automobile workshop owner from Delhi who became a seer years ago. He has gone on a simple fruit diet to “prepare for fasting to death”.
In the hermitage of hunger, this is how they prepare to give up their lives for the river.
While many parts of India are going through a sustained water crisis, the western city of Pune is trying to deal with the problem in a rather unusual way, writes the BBC’s Geeta Pandey.
The dystopian future we worried about is already here.
Many restaurants in the city of Pune have begun serving only half glasses of water to guests.
At the pure vegetarian Kalinga restaurant, a couple have just been seated when a waiter approaches their table and asks if they want water.
“I said yes and he gave me half a glass of water,” says Gauripuja Mangeshkar. “I was wondering if I was being singled out, but then I saw that he had only poured half a glass for my husband too.”
For a moment, Ms Mangeshkar did wonder whether her glass was half full or half empty, but the reason why she was served less water was not really existential.
Nearly 400 restaurants in Pune have adopted this measure to reduce water use, ever since the civic authorities announced cuts in supply a month ago.
Image captionGauripuja Mangeshkar was served half a glass of water at a restaurant in Pune
Pune Restaurant and Hoteliers’ Association president Ganesh Shetty, who owns Kalinga, told the BBC that they have worked out an extensive plan to save water.
“We serve only half glasses of water and we don’t refill unless asked, the leftover water is recycled and used for watering plants and cleaning the floor,” Mr Shetty explained. “Many places have put in new toilets which use less water, we have put in water harvesting plants and the staff are briefed on minimising water use.”
Kalinga gets about 800 customers a day and by serving only half glasses, he says the restaurant is able to save nearly 800 litres (1,691 pints) of water a day.
“Every drop is precious and we have to act now if we want to save the future.”
Owner of 83-year-old Poona Guest House, Kishor Sarpotdar, shows the shorter steel tumblers he’s bought to replace the earlier taller ones. His restaurant is not only serving half glasses of water, he says, they are serving them in smaller ones too.
Pune is next door to India’s financial capital, Mumbai. An educational and cultural hub, it was famously described as the “Oxford and Cambridge of India” by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
This city of four million people has been well served by the Khadakwasala dam built in 1878, and water shortages are new here.
Mr Shetty says the first major water crisis the city faced was two years ago.
“For two months in February and March, our water supply was reduced by half. We got water once in two days.”
Strict guidelines were issued about what fresh water supplied by the civic authorities could – or couldn’t – be used for. And people were encouraged to install bore wells to pump out ground water to meet additional requirements.
All construction in the city was stopped for two months, car garages were allowed to do only dry servicing, the city celebrated a dry Holi, clubs and water resorts were barred from holding popular rain dance events and swimming pools were ordered shut.
All misuse was checked and those who erred were made to pay hefty fines.
Image captionKishor Sarpotdar shows the shorter steel tumblers he’s bought to replace the earlier taller ones
“It was very serious,” says Col Shashikant Dalvi, Pune-based water conservation expert.
This year, he says, the situation is “worse”. “Panic buttons have been pressed in October itself. How will we face the challenge in the summer months?” he asks.
According to a government report earlier this year, India is facing its worst-ever water crisis, with some 600 million people affected. The report said the crisis was “only going to get worse” in the coming years and warned that 21 cities were likely to run out of groundwater by 2020.
In May, the popular Indian tourist town of Shimla ran out of water, while last year it was reported that the city of Bangalore was drying up.
Large parts of the western state of Maharashtra, where Pune is located, are water deficient and every year, at the onset of the summer season, the state makes the news for “water wars” between districts – farmers, villagers, city residents, slum dwellers, the hospitality industry and businesses all clamouring for their share of water.
This year, that talk has already started. And it’s just the beginning of winter. Many areas are already staring at drought and acute water distress.
And this time, Pune too is affected. In October, the Pune Municipal Corporation announced 10% cuts in supply for everyone.
Image captionRestaurant owner Ganesh Shetty says every drop is precious and we have to act now if we want to save the future
Col Dalvi though is baffled about this shortage.
“The crisis two years ago,” he says, “was because of deficient rainfall. But this year, Pune had excessive rainfall until the end of July. The dams were full. So where has the water gone?”
The monsoon rains will not come before June and eight months can be a long time. “It’ll be a nightmare for the city unless we get some rains in the winter,” he says.
Experts blame climate change, deforestation and the rapidly growing city population as the main reasons for the water shortage. And the fact that the Khadakwasala dam reservoir has never been de-silted, which means its capacity to hold water is reducing daily.
Col Dalvi offers a prescription to deal with the water shortage in Pune and the rest of the country, because by “2025 India will be most populous country in the world”.
“Leakages must be plugged, unsustainable over-extraction of ground water must stop, rooftop rain water harvesting and recycling of water must be made mandatory, otherwise shortages would get more critical,” he says.
What about restaurants serving half glasses of water to patrons? Is it just a gimmick, I ask.
“Not at all,” he says. “It’s not a gimmick. It’s an excellent idea. A drop saved is a drop gained.”
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Indian farmers and rural workers marched to the Indian parliament in the capital, New Delhi, on Friday in a protest against soaring operating costs and plunging produce prices that have brought misery to many.
Farmers march towards the parliament house during a rally to protest soaring farm operating costs and plunging prices of their produce, in New Delhi, India, November 30, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
The protest is one of the biggest displays of frustration with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which faces a tough general election due by May next year. India’s 263 million farmers make up an important voting bloc.
“Farmers have been routinely committing suicide,” said one of the protest leaders, Yogendra Yadav, as he marched in a crowd down a central Delhi thoroughfare.
“It’s a shame that the government doesn’t have any time for those who feed us,” said Yadav, who leads the Jai Kisan Andolan, a farmers’ group.
Low food prices, export curbs, anti-inflation policies that keep rural incomes low and a broad shift from subsidies to investment spending have all infuriated and demoralised farmers.
Core inflation in India, where farming is a mainstay for nearly half the people, has hovered around 6 percent in the past few months, but food prices have either fallen or remained stagnant.
Agriculture contributes about 15 percent to India’s $2.6 trillion economy, Asia’s third-largest, but employs nearly half of its 1.3 billion people.
Farmers from more than 200 groups began gathering in New Delhi on Thursday. They demanded that the government call a special session of parliament to discuss the crisis in the countryside.
“I myself know so many farmers who have committed suicide, and their families are now living in penury,” said farmer Lakhan Pal Singh from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
“The policies of the Modi administration are responsible.”
Farmers have also protested in the financial hub of Mumbai, including this month when tens of thousands of farmers marched to Mumbai to demand loan waivers and the transfer of forest land to villagers.
New Delhi police deployed 3,500 personnel in the city on Friday but there was no trouble.
In October, police fired teargas and water cannons in a clash with about 50,000 farmers heading for New Delhi.
‘LAST STRAW’
The discontent in the countryside, where 70 percent of Indians live, could erode support for Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won India’s biggest parliamentary mandate in three decades in the last general election in 2014.
But political analysts and farm economists say Modi will find it hard to repeat that next time.
“We voted for the BJP but anti-farmer policies of the government have hit us hard,” said Singh.
The last time a BJP government lost power, in a 2004 election, it was largely because rural voters abandoned the party.
Last year, police shot and killed six farmers protesting against lower prices in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, which recently held a state assembly election – a neck-and-neck contest between the BJP and opposition Congress party.
The result is due on Dec. 11.
Leaders from the main opposition Congress party, as well as left-wing parties and the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party addressed the flag-waving protesters who converged in the historic heart of the city.
“We’ve been living a hand-to-mouth existence for a very long time but rising prices of seeds, diesel and fertiliser and falling prices of milk, fruits, vegetables and even staples is the last straw,” said farmer Shivpal Yadav.
“If the government doesn’t address the problems, we’ll be back,” said Yadav, from the northern state of Haryana.
Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Robert Birsel
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Two men accused of trying to molest a 20-year-old woman in northern India set her on fire two days later after she lodged a complaint with police, authorities and her family said.
Women in India have struggled to secure prosecution for sexual attacks in the face of widespread police indifference, rights activists say.
The woman was in a field near her home in the Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh state when the men, both neighbours and known to her family, accosted her and tried to drag her away, her brother Vinod Kumar told Reuters.
She bit their hands and managed to break free and escape, and her father filed a complaint with police same day, he said. When no action resulted, the family lodged a second complaint.
“We waited for the police to come for inquiries the entire day but no one came,” Vinod said.
The next day, the two men returned to the field where she was working, doused her with kerosene and set her on fire, Regional police superintendent Prabhakar Chaudhary told Reuters. She suffered burns to 40 percent of her body and was hospitalised.
Chaudhary said her suspected attackers were arrested and three policemen suspended for dereliction of duties.
After a gruesome gang rape of a young woman in 2012, India launched fast-track courts and a tougher rape law that included the death penalty. But crime statistics indicate sexual assault on women have risen, not fallen, since then.
Even if cases are registered, crime statistics show that police files remain open for about a third of all rapes that were investigated for each year between 2012 and 2016.
Rights groups have accused Indian police of bowing to pressure from local politicians to bury investigations. In some cases investigations of sexual assault have evaporated out of sheer police apathy, activists say.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – A senior police officer and another man were killed on Monday in violent protests over reports of a slaughtered cow, an animal sacred in Hindu culture, in India’s Uttar Pradesh state.
A crowd angered over what they believed was the slaughter of the cow threw stones and torched vehicles outside a police station. The officer died from gunshot wounds, district magistrate Anuj Jha told Reuters.
Earlier, police had said the officer was stoned to death and the other man died from gunshot wounds.
“Villagers complained after they found a dead cow, and took to the streets to protest. They blocked a road with a tractor and pelted stones,” he said.
So-called cow vigilantes from India’s Hindu majority have attacked and killed a number of Muslims involved in transporting cattle to slaughterhouses in recent years. However, the exact circumstances of Monday’s protests were not clear.
Reporting by Sudarshan Varadhan, Himani Singh and Amit Ganguly; Edited by Mark Heinrich
Image copyrightISROImage captionThe satellite was launched from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana early on Wednesday
India’s heaviest satellite has gone into orbit on a French rocket to help boost broadband internet services.
Weighing about 5,854kg (12,906lb), the GSAT-11 is India’s “most-advanced” multi-band communication satellite.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) launched the satellite from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana early on Wednesday morning.
It will be placed in a geostationary orbit by the end of this month and its transponders will be switched on.
Isro chief K Sivan told reporters that the satellite will “play a vital role in providing broadband services across the country”.
Scientists say it will provide internet access to “off-grid” remote areas in India – hills and islands, for example – where traditional fixed-line broadband services are not available and would be helpful during emergencies and disaster relief. And it will also help provide internet connectivity during air travel in India.
India hired a French rocket to carry the satellite, which is expected to have a life span of 15 years, because it does not have a rocket to carry such a heavy payload.
MUMBAI, June 3 (Reuters) – India wants to encourage aircraft makers to manufacture in the country, starting with components and moving eventually to complete aircraft, Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said on Sunday.
In a series of messages on Twitter, Prabhu appealed to Airbus and Boeing Co to participate in the push as part of the government’s flagship “Make In India” campaign, highlighting the growth potential of the booming market, which has been adding passengers and cutting fares.
India’s booming aviation market and economy needs more than 1,000 passenger planes and “many more” cargo planes, Prabhu, who last week visited an Airbus facility in Toulouse in France, wrote in the Twitter post.
Airbus said last year it expected Indian carriers to order 1,750 aircraft over 20 years. Boeing predicted up to 2,100 planes would be sold in the same period. (Reporting by Aditi Shah and Devidutta Tripathy, editing by Larry king)
The project was supported by DRDO, department of science and technology, and IIT-K.(Picture for representation)
Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) said on Monday they have developed textile-based metamaterials that can help defence personnel and vehicles avoid being detected by enemy radars.
The project was supported by the Defence Research Development Organisation, the department of science and technology, and IIT-K. It was carried out by Kumar Vaibhav Srivastava of the electrical engineering department and J Ramkumar of the mechanical engineering department of the institute.
They said the material can be used as uniforms for personnel and skirting or covering ground vehicles to avoid their detection by the enemy’s advanced battlefield radars, motion-detecting ground sensors and thermal imaging systems. The material is flexible and can be customised for different climates, they added.
“In a major achievement, we have designed and produced micro-structured infra-red metamaterials with processes that can be readily scaled for mass production to cover large area surfaces. These infra-red metamaterials are applied on any given surface to reduce the thermal emission to create infra-red stealth,” professor S Anantha Ramakrishna of the department of physics at IIT-K said.
Transparent meta-material absorbers have also been developed for vehicular windshields or a canopy of slow aircraft like helicopters.
“We are also in the process of developing robust meta-materials for radar stealth which can be applied on high-speed aircraft and switchable meta-materials for active camouflage applications,” Ramakrishna said.
He said at the beginning of the 21st century, new composite micro-structured materials called meta-materials were found to have very unexpected properties due to their specific structure that caused resonant interactions with electromagnetic waves.
Ramakrishna said they began working on defence applications of metamaterials, which will reduce radar detection in most radar bands, around 2010.
“Stealth fighter aircraft were already in use but they used very different concepts and heavy ceramic ferrites for achieving stealth. Meta-material based absorbers held the promise of lightweight, ultra-thin and flexible materials that could be applied literally on any surface to give the required properties at radar frequencies, infra-red frequencies or even optical frequencies,” he said.
The professor said they have also been able to realise metamaterials for infra-red light that will enable forces to completely control the emission of infra-red light from surfaces, which can be used for infra-red stealth.
“Laboratory level development of demonstrations has been completed and now we are proceeding for field testing,” he said.
The green panel said that even after more than four-and-a-half years, the complaint of the aggrieved parties is that the pollution caused by the unregulated handling of plastic continues to remain unabated.
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It had asked the chief secretary to hold a joint meeting with the persons considered responsible for compliance. (File photo: PTI)
The National Green Tribunal Monday asked the Delhi government to deposit Rs 25 crore with the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) for their failure to curb the problem of pollution in the city.
A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel also asked the AAP government to furnish a performance guarantee of Rs 25 crore with the apex pollution monitoring body to ensure that there is no further lapse in this regard.
It said despite its clear directions, there is hardly any action for compliance of orders of the tribunal and pollution continues unabated in blatant violation of law and under the nose of the authorities “who have hardly done anything concrete except furnishing excuses and helplessness”.
The green panel said that even after more than four-and-a-half years, the complaint of the aggrieved parties is that the pollution caused by the unregulated handling of plastic continues to remain unabated.
The tribunal was hearing pleas filed by Mundka village resident Satish Kumar and Tikri-Kalan native Mahavir Singh alleging pollution caused by burning of plastic, leather, rubber, motor engine oil and other waste materials and continuous operation of illegal industrial units dealing with such articles on agricultural lands in Mundka and Neelwal villages.
The tribunal had earlier directed the Delhi chief secretary to co-ordinate with the concerned municipal authorities, police authorities and other officers responsible for compliance of orders of this tribunal already passed referred to ensure compliance at the ground-level forthwith.
It had asked the chief secretary to hold a joint meeting with the persons considered responsible for compliance and till the orders remain un-complied, continue to hold such meetings at least once a month.
“It will be open to the chief secretary to seek feedback from concerned inhabitants about the ground situation,” the NGT had said.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 