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The Morning Wrap: Centre Says Toxic Air Killed 35,000 This Decade; Provident Funds Debut On India Stock Market

The Morning Wrap: Centre Says Toxic Air Killed 35,000 This Decade; Provident Funds Debut On India Stock Market
JHARIA, JHARKAND, INDIA - 2014/10/24: A child walks through a cloud of smoke in a village located between one the coal mines. Methane and other toxic gases spew from the open wounds in the crust near coal mines in Jharia. Jharia in India's eastern Jharkand state is literally in flames. This is due to the open cast coal mining that takes place in the area. For more than 90 years, the Jharian coal mines have been alight with coal mining villages of around seven hundred thousand people settling in. Most of the mining is done with open cast as the price to mine is relatively lower to produce the profits. However, open cast mining does have its disadvantages including the release of toxic chemicals into our atmosphere. Everywhere you look, there will be coal to mine. And so villagers in Jharia often go out with their own shovels to mine whatever coal there is in the ground to support their families after selling the coal at the market center. The open pits of coal on the other hand, often catch fire due to careless cigarette bud tipping or due to lightning strikes in the area and will burn for years to come; spewing toxic and hazardous chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere. About 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide gets pumped into the atmosphere and could even be considered as the 4th most polluting area of India. Life however, is something that most will fight for, and if destroying the environment means feeding their families; workers will continue to run outside with their shovels and dig up all the coal they can find to survive. (Photo by Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Jonas Gratzer via Getty Images
JHARIA, JHARKAND, INDIA - 2014/10/24: A child walks through a cloud of smoke in a village located between one the coal mines. Methane and other toxic gases spew from the open wounds in the crust near coal mines in Jharia. Jharia in India's eastern Jharkand state is literally in flames. This is due to the open cast coal mining that takes place in the area. For more than 90 years, the Jharian coal mines have been alight with coal mining villages of around seven hundred thousand people settling in. Most of the mining is done with open cast as the price to mine is relatively lower to produce the profits. However, open cast mining does have its disadvantages including the release of toxic chemicals into our atmosphere. Everywhere you look, there will be coal to mine. And so villagers in Jharia often go out with their own shovels to mine whatever coal there is in the ground to support their families after selling the coal at the market center. The open pits of coal on the other hand, often catch fire due to careless cigarette bud tipping or due to lightning strikes in the area and will burn for years to come; spewing toxic and hazardous chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere. About 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide gets pumped into the atmosphere and could even be considered as the 4th most polluting area of India. Life however, is something that most will fight for, and if destroying the environment means feeding their families; workers will continue to run outside with their shovels and dig up all the coal they can find to survive. (Photo by Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Essential HuffPost

Airtel CEO, Gopal Vittal, has said that being able to filter out child pornography was beyond the organisation's current capabilities.

Karan Anshuman, one-time film critic and director of the forthcoming Bangistan says fatherhood thrills him more than the imminent release of the film.

India's passport office has cut the time required to renew a passport by doing away with multiple police verifications.

Monica Singh draws on her personal experiences as an acid-attack survivor to show how determination can help you overcome your darkest days.

Hollywood star Elijah Wood, best known as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is making his maiden visit to India, as a disc jockey, this September.

Main News

Two days after an attack on a Border Security Force convoy, militants have attacked a police outpost, again in Udhampur, injuring two personnel.

The Union environment ministry, which is normally silent on pollution-related deaths, said in Parliament that more than 35,000 people had died due to acute respiratory infections (ARI) across India in close to 10 years.

Nearly 64 years after its formation, the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), India's state-run pension fund with a retirement corpus of Rs 8.5 lakh crore, has finally entered the stock markets with an initial allocation of Rs 5,000 crore for the current fiscal.

Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire investor, who's launched a hunt for extra-terrestrial life, announced he'd taken a small stake in Practo, a rapidly expanding start-up in Bangalore that helps patients and doctors digitise their engagements.

Both the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Border Security Force (BSF), the two largest paramilitary forces in the country, have claimed credit for gunning down an alleged Pakistani militant in Udhampur.

Off The Front Page

A salon owner in Lucknow has got the influential Darul Uloom Deoband seminary to issue a fatwa stating that shaving was un-Islamic. Thus you can get a haircut at the salon but not a shave.

After all the hype around making voting compulsory in civic polls, the Gujarat government resorted to tokenism by fixing a paltry fine of Rs 100 for defaulters.

In a real-life, contemporary updation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a Delhi thief ran an institute to teach ways to rob ATMs.

Aided by snazzy branding, country liquor has upgraded itself as a respectable drink of choice.

Jhunjhunu, a desert town in Rajasthan, is emerging as an international tourist destination for those who want to see the ancestral homes of India's leading business families such as the Piramals, Modis, Singhanias and the Goenkas.

Opinion

Pratap Bhanu Mehta says that Modi seems fated to be yet another 'missing prime minister.'

Praveen Chakravarty finds that there is no relationship between an MP's performance in Parliament and his chances of getting re-elected.

Manmohan Bahadur says that for countries when faced with external threats, "...escalating intelligently-- sometimes, non-escalation can also be the basis for an escalation strategy..."

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.