This brief article by Prof Jayanta Bandyopadhyay in the May 16-31 2010 issue of Business Economics magazine, highlights the recent plans of the central and state goverments of constructing a large number of dams on Himalayan rivers. Environmentalists continue to consistently argue against the construction of dams that are built without respect for ecological sciences and warn that this could lead to increase in disasters in the fragile Himalayan region.
The document identifies the urgent need to move away from simplistic Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) done in such plans and argues that focus on narrow and immediate gains that do not look at the long term impacts, should be replaced by plans based on Strategic Impact Assessments (SIAs) that take into consideration the broader ecology of the area.
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