How NHAI is meeting the enormous challenge of digging long tunnels in mountains to bring Kashmir closer to the rest of India. The Banihal-Qazigund and Chenani-Nashri tunnels are part of an ambitious plan of the NHAI to realign, restructure and redevelop the existing two-lane Jammu-Srinagar highway and construct a state-of-art four-lane highway between the summer and winter capitals of Jammu and Kashmir. The new four-lane highway will pass through a dozen tunnels, two dozen viaducts and 150 bridges, cutting down the existing distance of around 300 km by 60 km and the travel time by half.

READ: Tunnels of hope in valley
 

Take your kids out to Nainital Lake this summer. They may not get another chance to see it as the water level of the famous lake is reducing at an alarming pace. It is not that the shoreline of the Nainital Lake receded only this year; it has been, by and large, a regular phenomenon for the last four-five years. Complacent in the face of the fact that the surface runoff in monsoon would replenish this 1.4-km long and 0.45-km wide lake in Uttarakhand with a mean depth of 18.5 metre, the government machinery never took it seriously.

READ: Take your kids out to Nainital Lake this summer

 

Yamuna is the second largest tributary of the holy river Ganga and shares the same fate as her sister. Both are losing their holiness and are choked by people and politics. Both are paying a heavy price for washing the toxic sins of humanity. 

READ: And unquiet flows the Yamuna

The constitution gave right to gender equality in the 1950s itself. Yet 68 years after independence, we are struggling against gender divide. At many places of worship only men are allowed, and women are not allowed. Bhumata Brigade founder Trupti Desai talks about her firebrand activism that has caught the imagination of people.

READ: Bring law to allow women inside places of worship
 

The debate over passive euthanasia has been reignited with the government coming up with a draft bill, but it is a year late for us. The union health ministry has come up with a draft bill on passive euthanasia that gives patients the right to “withhold or withdraw medical treatment to herself or himself” and “allow nature to take its own course”. The draft, titled Terminally Ill Patients (protection of patients and medical practitioners) Bill, has been uploaded on the health ministry’s website and comments have been invited by June 19.

READ: Of course, allow right to die for the terminally ill
 

 
On May 5, bombs were dropped on the al-Kammouneh refugee camp near Sarmada in Syria close to the Turkish border. At least 30 Syrian refugees including children were killed. Videos show frantic fire-fighters trying to put out flames while blood mingled with flowing water. Will countries adhere to International Humanitarian Law after UNSC adopts another resolution?

READ: No safe zones