Ganga panel to study impact of hydel projects

Direct intervention from the Prime Minister’s Office is learnt to have catalysed the formation of the committee,including the selection of its head.

In the last meeting of the NGRBA in April,the PM had said the government would form a mechanism under an expert as a way forward to study the two main government-commissioned cumulative impact assessment reports on the subject — one by the Wildlife Institute of India,Dehradun,and the other by the IIT-Roorkee — for the committee to assess.

A 2011 report of the National Environment and Energy Research Institute (NEERI),which claimed that the upper reaches of Ganga had unique “self-purification” qualities,is being cited by the protesters who are saying that hindrance to the Ganga’s free flow would affect its self-purifying properties.

The IIT-Roorkee report was an assessment of the 70 proposed hydel projects on the upper reaches of Ganga while the WII report was with regard to the impact on the wildlife and aquatic fauna. The protesters have all along trashed these reports calling them “custom-made for the government”.

HC notices to FB,Google to recover taxes

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has issued notices to the Centre,Facebook and Google on a petition seeking recovery of taxes on the websites’ income from their operations in India.

The petition,filed by former BJP ideologue and now patron of the Rashtriya Swabhimaan Aandolan K N Govindacharya,has also sought directions to the Centre and the websites to ensure the latter met RBI’s accounting guidelines and safeguard data of 50 million Indian users,which,the petition alleges,has been transferred to the USA for commercial gains.

The petition claims the websites were not following the Centre’s Know Your Customer guidelines for telecom companies.