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/ 29 November 2006
The once low-budget tourist haven of Goa is facing a crisis, environmentalists say, as developers force up land prices and a tourism boom threatens the delicate coastal ecology. Environmental groups in this former Portuguese enclave, which became part of India in 1961, have joined ranks in an effort to slow the building boom in sleepy towns and remote villages dotting the edge of Arabian Sea.
Indian troops sealed off large parts of Kashmir’s summer capital following random grenade attacks and murders ahead of a visit on Wednesday by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Combat troops backed up commandos and border guards in Srinagar, where residents in several districts found themselves corralled into ”sanitised zones” on Tuesday.
The city of Varanasi, reeling from a deadly triple bomb attack, is India’s holiest Hindu site where pilgrims flock to wash away their sins in the sacred River Ganges and to die. Millions of devotees each year visit the ancient temple-studded town targeted late on Tuesday by what police called ”suspected terrorists” — a usual official term for Islamic extremists.
A surge in job-seekers sailing to the Andamans for a slice of the post-tsunami aid pie could alter the archipelago’s demography and further squeeze its indigenous peoples, experts warn. Environmentalists are also urging large relief agencies to pack up and leave the palm-fringed Andamans, arguing they are doing more harm than good to the islanders.
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/ 26 December 2005
Housing being provided by India in the tsunami-battered Andamans is ”totally unsuitable”, a United Nations expert said, while thousands of survivors crammed into tin shacks begged for proper housing a year after the disaster. Miloon Kothari, the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing, criticised living conditions in the archipelago.
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/ 24 December 2005
Tsunami was born on the morning of December 26 2004 to an exhausted mother sheltering in a crevice in the ground from the giant waves that crashed into India’s Andaman archipelago. Today, the miracle baby is something of a celebrity as he approaches his first birthday.