Heavy rains again hit Kerala on Wednesday killing four more people and taking the death toll to 43 since August 8.

It has been raining heavily in several parts of the state since Tuesday evening. The authorities were forced to open 33 dams across Kerala.

Those reported dead on Wednesday were a couple in Malappuram who was crushed after their house crumbled. Their six-year-old child is missing.

A person died in a Munnar lodge as it crashed. A 70-year-old woman in Ranni near Pathanamthitta was electrocuted as her house was submerged.

The Idukki dam floodgates were reopened late on Tuesday as the water level in the Periyar river and its tributaries flowing through Ernakulam and Thrissur districts rose menacingly.

Following flooding in and around the Cochin International Airport, all flights were canceled till 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

The Met has forecast more rains till Saturday.

Authorities are maintaining a close vigil especially in Idukki district as the shutters of the Mullaperiyar dam were also opened at 2.35 a.m. after its water-level crossed 140 feet.

People living in and around the dam were evacuated late on Tuesday.

Leaves of all revenue department officials have been canceled, authorities said.

Rains which started on August 8 are said to have caused the worst damage to Kerala since 1924. Over 50,000 people are in relief camps and the damages to crops and properties is estimated to be over Rs 8,000 crore.

Torrential rains up to 30 cm lashed Karnataka’s coastal and south interior districts, causing landslides and disrupting normal life, officials said on Tuesday.

“Very heavy rainfall was received in the coastal districts of Udupi, Dakshina Kannada and Uttara Kannada, along with heavy downpours in Malnad (south interior) districts of Chikkamagaluru, Hassan and Shivamogga,” an official from the Bengaluru division of India Meteorological Department (IMD) told IANS.

Parts of Udupi received rainfall measuring as high as 30.1 cm, Dakshina Kannada 16.1 cm, Uttara Kannada 18.5 cm, Shivamogga 16 cm, Kodagu 19.4 cm and Chikkamagaluru 13.2 cm.

Few regions of Hassan district in the south interior region of the state received rainfall up to 24.5cm, according to the IMD.

Due to the unabated rains, landslides were reported across several parts, obstructing vehicular traffic.

A landslide at Sakleshpur sub-district in the Western Ghats mountains has obstructed the vehicular movement on the Bengaluru-Mangaluru route.

The traffic along the highway between Madikeri in the Western Ghats range in Kodagu district to Mangaluru was also blocked, officials said.

Several schools and colleges in low-lying areas remained shut on Tuesday.

The rain water from the reservoirs in the Cauvery basin, which have been filled to their maximum capacity, is being released to avoid collapsing of the dams.

“Over 60,000 cusecs of rain water is being released from Krishna Raja Sagara (KRS) reservoir across Cauvery river in Mandya district, and 40,000 cusecs from Kabini reservoir across Kabini in Mysuru district,” Director of Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNDMC) G.S. Srinivasa Reddy told IANS.

The released reservoir water, along with incessant rains, have been flooding farmlands in low-lying towns and villages in the Cauvery basin.

Last week, another 80,000 cusecs of water was released from Kabini reservoir and 59,000 cusecs from KRS reservoir, forcing the district administration to shift people living in low-lying areas to safety.

With the Arabian Sea being rough with winds along the coast, the IMD has asked the fishermen not to venture into the sea.

“Due to strong winds along the Karnataka coast, sea condition is likely to be rough in the southwest and central Arabian sea. Fishermen are advised not to venture into the waters,” an advisory from the IMD said.

Heavy rains are likely to continue for the next three days, Reddy added.

The Supreme Court on Monday accepted Centre’s proposal to have hologram-based colour-coded stickers on vehicles that would help in identifying automobiles running on various kinds of fuels.

A bench of Justice Madan B. Lokur, Justice S. Abdul Nazeer and Justice Deepak Gupta asked the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) to implement by September 30 the scheme of colour-codes stickers on vehicles plying in National Capital Region (NCR).

The Centre told the bench that the diesel vehicles will have orange stickers pasted on their windshield while petrol and CNG vehicles will have blue stickers.

The bench also suggested the Centre to to consider having green number plates for electric and hybrid vehicles.

Additional Solicitor General (ASG) A.N.S. Nadkarni told the court that the ministry would look into it and decide soon.

The issue of colour-coded stickers was raised when the court was hearing a petition on air pollution in Delhi-NCR.

Advocate Aparajita Singh, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the case, had told the court that there should be coloured stickers for petrol and diesel vehicles according to the Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) suggestions.

The amicus curiae said the colour-coded stickers would help to identify the kind of fuel being used in vehicles.

The Centre also told the apex court that there was no objection to putting stickers on vehicles.

Heavy rains in Himachal Pradesh claimed five lives and hundreds remained stranded across the state after incessant rainfall triggered landslides and snapped road links, an official said on Monday.

Three persons were killed in Mandi district in landslide incidents, while a boy was washed away in the swollen Kaushalya river near Parwanoo in Solan district.

Reports said five persons were buried under a landslide near Chakla village in Kandaghat in Solan district. One of them reportedly died. Rescue work is still on.

After heavy overnight rains, most of the roads in the interiors of the state remained closed to traffic on Monday, stranding hundreds of travellers and commuters.

The Chandigarh-Manali National Highway-21 has been closed for vehicles near Mandi town, an official said. Likewise, traffic on the Chandigarh-Shimla National Highway-5 was hampered near Chakki Ka Mor in Solan district.

The Mandi-Pathankot, the Chamba-Pathankot and the Shimla-Nahan national highways were blocked by landslides.

Vehicular movement in Kinnaur district remained suspended since a large stretch of the Hindustan-Tibet Road has been under landslides at several points.

An official said the road network in the higher reaches of Kinnaur, Shimla, Chamba, Mandi, Kullu and Sirmaur districts was the worst affected and efforts were being made to reopen it.

As a precautionary measure, all schools and educational institutes in Shimla, Solan, Kullu, Hamirpur, Kangra, Kinnaur and Mandi districts were closed for the day.

According to the Met office here, moderate to heavy showers have occurred in most parts of the state since Sunday.

Paonta Sahib in Sirmaur district recorded the highest rainfall in the state at 239 mm, while it was 238 mm in Sujanpur Tira town in Hamirpur district.

Nehri town in Mandi district recorded 235 mm in the past 24 hours, while Palampur town recorded 212 mm.

It was 172 mm in the state capital, 142 in Dharamsala town, 98 mm in Kasauli, 94 mm in Solan town and 57 mm in Dalhousie.

The weather office has forecast heavy rains across the state till Tuesday.

Beating the highly polluted Delhi, the Garden City Bengaluru has topped the list of six major polluting cities in the country.

According to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report, the state capital recorded the second-worst pollution due to increased industrial activities, a high number of diesel generator sets, road dust, and vehicle emission.

However, Lakshman, chairman of Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB), has reacted with skepticism. “Bengaluru does not have so many polluting industries. I don’t think these are accurate numbers. I will verify the numbers,” he told TOI

More than 660 million Indians are exposed to high air pollution as they live in areas where the fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exceeds the permissible limit, researchers said on Monday.

People in the national capital would live six years longer if its air quality met the national standards.

To help improve India’s air quality, researchers from the University of Chicago and Harvard Kennedy School have laid out five key evidence-based policy recommendations in a new report titled “A Roadmap Towards Cleaning India’s Air”, which was released here on Monday.

It draws learnings from working with different state pollution control boards over the last several years, a spokesperson for Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC-India) told IANS.

EPIC-India researchers have developed the air quality life index (AQLI), a metric that provides a means to predict the overall reduction in life expectancy caused by living in places with high levels of air pollution.

If India were to achieve its own air quality standards, life expectancy would increase by more than one year on an average, says the 16-page report. This number would increase to four years if India were to meet the World Health Organisation’s norms.

Some of the greatest gains would be seen in the country’s largest cities, such as Delhi. There, people would live six years longer if air quality met the national standards. Similar gains are expected across the Indo-Gangetic plain, including in the rural areas.

The recommendations by the report include: Improving emissions monitoring by better aligning incentives of auditors, providing regulators with real-time data on polluters’ emissions, applying monetary charges for excess emissions, providing the public with information about polluters, and using markets to reduce abatement costs and pollution.

“Air pollution is causing hundreds of millions of people in India to lead shorter and sicker lives,” said Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman Professor in Economics and the Director of the EPIC and the Tata Centre for Development (TCD) at Chicago.

“However, we are at the dawn of a new era where the combination of advances in computing power and big data are creating radical new opportunities for environmental regulations to reduce air pollution, without undermining the urgent goal of robust economic growth in India.”

An optimistic Rohini Pande, the Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy and co-director of Evidence for Policy Design at Harvard Kennedy School, said: “While the economic costs of pollution are high, and there is no easy solution, we remain optimistic because of the incredible innovations currently being experimented with throughout India.”

The policy brief was released in conjunction with the National Conference on Innovations in Pollution Regulation, organised by EPIC-India and the TCD here.

Aimed at facilitating knowledge sharing between policymakers, regulators and academics on pollution regulation and measurement, representatives from more than five state pollution control boards and experts from India and abroad attended the conference.

Inaugurated by National Green Tribunal Chairman Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel, the discussions were focused mainly on the role of pollution data in decision-making, the need for better quality data, strengthening enforcement through public disclosure and the advantages of market-based instruments in reducing pollution.

Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Mahesh Sharma on Friday said the population of elephants in the country was 27,312 in 2017 and added that from 2013 to 2016, around 100 elephants had died due to unnatural causes and 489 human lives were lost.

Replying to a question raised by CPI(M) Jitendra Choudhury during the Question Hour in Lok Sabha, Sharma said: “The member sought the number of elephant population. As per preliminary reports, it is 27,312 in 2017.”

“As regards the number of poachings or the number of casualties of human beings and elephants, in the three years from 2013 to 2016, 100 elephants have died because of unnatural causes and around 489 human lives were also lost in the last year,” he added.

He also said the government has taken initiatives to increase the compensation for loss of human lives and loss of crops due to man-animal conflict.

Thousands living around the Idukki dam and in Ernakulam and Thrissur heaved a sigh of relief on Saturday as the heavy rains predicted in Kerala did not happen and as a result the Idukki dam waters ravaging the area over the last few days subsided.

“The rains have slowed down in and around the Idukki dam since last night and hence the water level in the dam has also come down,” State Power Minister M.M. Mani said.

“So far things are fine and everything is going as planned. The water that came down the five floodgates, barring at Cheruthoni, has not caused any major crisis,” added Mani, who is monitoring the situation from here.

Cheruthoni is the nearest town to the Idamalayar dam and with water gushing down the spillway for the first time in 26 years, there was heavy flooding in the area.

The Cheruthoni bridge continued to be submerged. It had come under severe stress with huge trees that have been uprooted coming and hitting the bridge.

The water level at the Idukki dam was now at 2,401 feet after it came down on Friday night as the intensity of the rains decreased.

On Saturday, the inflow into the dam stood at 6,00,000 litres of water per second, while the outflow through the floodgates is 7.50 lakh litres per second.

Authorities on Friday expected that parts of Ernakulam and Thrissur districts would be submerged following the opening of all five floodgates.

However, this did not happen as the dam water entered the tributaries of the Periyar river in a systematic manner.

According to informed sources, if the water level in the dam comes down to 2,400 feet, it was likely to bring down the outflow through the five shutters as well — to around 5,00,000 litres per second.

On Saturday morning, a team led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan accompanied by Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala, State Forest Minister P. Raju, Chief Secretary Tom Jose and Kerala Police Chief Loknath Behra took off in a helicopter from Thiruvananthapuram to survey the worst affected districts.

Even though their first stop was planned at Idukki, Vijayan wrote in his Facebook post that due to bad weather conditions at the landing area in Kattapana, they have been forced to travel to Wayanad.

The floods have claimed 27 lives so far.

Rs 10 crore worth relief materials has been rushed to the neighbouring flood-hit Kerala by Karnataka following heavy monsoon rains revealed an official statement on Thursday.

“Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy directed state Chief Secretary T.M. Vijaya Bhaskar to rush relief materials and a team of doctors to Kerala, reeling under heavy rains and flash floods. Kumaraswamy also called on his Kerala counterpart Pinarayi Vijayan and discussed the flood situation in that state. He also offered more relief material and aid to the affected people across the state” said the statement.

The state government has also agreed to Kerala’s request to release 75,000 cusecs of water from Kabini reservoir in Mysuru districts to tackle the flash floods caused by excessive backwaters across the border in Kerala.

The death toll in the incessant rain-related incidents has risen to 26 and there are reports on large-scale damage occurring at various places in Kerala. The worst-affected districts in coastal and north-eastern areas of Kerala include Idukki, Malappuram, Palghat, Kozhikode, Wayanad and parts of Kannur.

relief camps have been opened in Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha, Idukki, Ernakulam, Thrissur, Palakkad, Malappuram, Kozhikode, Wayanad and Kannur while one hundred control rooms have been opened in flood-hit districts in the state.

Rains in some parts of the Karnataka Kodagu and parts of Mysuru district of Karnataka have been receiving torrential rains and authorities have issued a flood alert for Mysuru while heavy vehicles have been restricted from plying on the Madikeri-Mangaluru highway.

Heavy rains lashed across Dakshina Kannada district on Thursday August 9 throwing normal life out of gear.

Following incessant rains in Shiradi and Charmadi Ghat regions on Wednesday and Thursday, the water level at Nethravati River has risen and several low level areas have been inundated.

The fire personnel shifted people residing in low lying areas in Rayara Chavadi in Bantwal, Jakribettu, Bastipadpu and other places. Bantwal Tahasildar Purandara Hegde led team with fire personnel shifted people affected by heavy rains to safer places. Also necessary precautionary steps were taken in Shamboor AMR and Thumbay dam before it reached the danger level.

A family had a miraculous escape here in Neria in Belthangady following a deadly landslide. A huge rock hit the house wall of one Renny on Thursday night. Her husband Vincy, children Priya and Prince escaped unhurt in the incident. Renny’s 70-year-old mother who was sleeping inside had minor injuries. MLA Harish Poonja and other representatives visited the site and have assured compensation.

Vehicular movement was disrupted for few hours following rain water flowing over Mangaluru-Bengaluru national highway. The Shishileshwara temple at Shishila has been submerged in rain water along with several connecting bridges remaining inundated.

Many other parts of Dakshina Kannada also experienced heavy rains on Thursday.

No heavy vehicles on Madikeri-Sampaje road following landslides

Following landslides in Katakeri on national highway between B C Road and Madikeri, the Kodagu district administration has restricted movement of heavy vehicles since Thursday August 9.

Deputy commissioner (DC) of Kodagu district, Shri Vidya , has ordered the commuters moving from Madikeri-Sampaje road to take an alternative route through Madikeri G T Circle, Mekeri in Virajpete and Talathmane.

The movement of bullet tankers, containers and other heavy vehicles have been banned by the district administration. The restriction does not apply to vehicles transporting gas cylinders, milk, vehicles carrying items to schools and other public transport.