Route to Nathu La

Even as the Kaziranga National Park celebrated 100 years of rhino conservation last month, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) has brought out a report that describes the forests in the Northeast as the ‘‘second richest in the world’’. The report hails the North Bank landscape — a ‘‘strategic conservation zone’’ covering approximately 14,000 sq km of the Himalayan foothills north of the Brahmaputra, as ‘‘extraordinary’’ and ‘‘a jewel in the crown of Indian forests’’. The WWF has proposed a wider conservation strategy named Eastern Himalayas Conservation Alliance, that will encompass specific conservation targets by mapping the forest habitats through satellite imagery. But the report has some words of caution too: on the rapid depredation of elephant habitats, massive top-soil erosion due to slash-and-burn cultivation practices, and lack of conservation initiatives involving the local population.

No Bangla please, we are Manipuri

Manipur is on the boil again. While the agitation against repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act has subsided following the Centre’s constitution of an expert committee to study the issue, the State is now witnessing an agitation against the continuation of Bengali script to write the Meitei or Manipuri language. Spearheading the agitation is the Meitei Iroleyek Loinasinllon Apunba Lup, which organised a series of protests that included burning of books written in the Bengali script. They have asked the government to print all school textbooks in the Meitei script from the current academic year. Local newspapers too want editors of Manipuri dailies to start replacing the Bengali script with Meitei.

Snowy nirvana

While the snowfall in Jammu and Kashmir hogged the national headlines, a similar situation in Arunachal’s Tawang went entirely unnoticed. Perched in the dizzy heights of the Eastern Himalayas, the town has remained cut off for over a week now. So heavy was the snowfall at Sela Pass, situated at an altitude of 13,700 feet, that the road links to and from Tawang was disrupted for days, covered in over seven feet of snow. Famous for its monasteries, the town was recently put on the tourist map.

Compiled by Samudra Gupta Kashyap