News stories by Malini Shankar, page 2

GOPALPUR, India, Oct 14 (IPS) - "No casualties have been reported till now," India's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) declared at 9:30 am the morning after the near Super Cyclone ‘Phailin' made landfall in India's east.

DEHRADUN, India, Oct 02 (IPS) - In Uttarakhand, the small Indian state in the Himalayan foothills that was a victim of flash floods that killed at least a thousand people in June this year and uprooted thousands of families, the story is told of a child who went every day to the helipad, believing his father will return when, in fact, the father died in the floods.

UTTARKASHI, India, Jul 27 (IPS) - Over a month after flash floods in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in north India left 1,000 dead and 6,000 missing, the government has yet to release a full agricultural impact assessment, sparking fears about the extent of damage to the region's farmland.

DEHRADUN, India, Jul 02 (IPS) - Over 580 bodies have so far been found. Hundreds more will likely never turn up. Survivors say they are suspended in a kind of nightmare, either haunted by memories of their brush with death or desperate for news of loved ones. At least 3,000 are reported to be missing.

BANGALORE, Mar 21 (IPS) - A state-of-the-art nuclear medicine hospital for cancer treatment in the heart of Bangalore goes well with the global image of this tech-savvy city.

PORT BLAIR, India, Dic 26 (IPS) - In commemoration of the eighth anniversary of the Asian tsunami, Wednesday was a day of prayer and mourning across the Andaman Nicobar Islands – located at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea – and south India's coastal Tamil Nadu state, two areas that suffered thousands of casualties on that fateful day.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Oct 13 (IPS) - In the aftermath of a natural disaster, women are often the most vulnerable. Particularly in rural areas, women suffer disproportionately from inadequate shelter and poor sanitation facilities and are often tasked with rebuilding shattered homes.

PORT BLAIR, India, Oct 05 (IPS) - Midway through Wildlife Week in India, celebrations have been marred by news that 29.8 kilogrammes of ivory, worth 336,800 dollars, had been seized on the Andaman Trunk Road.

PORT BLAIR, Aug 15 (IPS) - Twenty two-year-old Ajay Kallu, hailing from the Bakultala village in northern Andamans, was devoured by an estuarine crocodile when he waded waist deep into a creek to fish on the morning of Aug. 1, marking the fifth fatal crocodile attack in 28 months in the remote Islands that lie at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

CHENNAI, Aug 04 (IPS) - At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Jul. 30, sleeping passengers in carriage S 11 on the Chennai-bound Tamilnadu Express were awoken by a blazing fire, as the train approached the east coast town of Nellore, just two and a half hours shy of its final destination.