How will it be Remembered

2010 according to the Chinese zodiac calendar is the year of the tiger. The question at this point of time is ‘how will the year of the tiger be remembered’?

India realized that to keep the legacy of the magnificent animal alive, bold steps were needed. The number of tigers in the country was reduced from a good forty thousand to a mere 1411 in a decade. Thus the ‘Save our Tigers’ campaign was born making the common Indians aware of the call of the wild.

In this very year India displayed a spectacular show of strength and prosperity as the doubts of the international community on India holding the Common Wealth Games and its ability were put to rest for once and for all.

2010 also brought in log pending verdicts to sensitive issues in the country such as Ayodhya and Bhopal.

2010 also saw the rise and the fall of Lalit Modi and the Indian Premier League (IPL) while the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket India) was steeped in controversy.

The start of the year had seen nations pledge their support for the protection of the environment. However man made disasters causing unimaginable damage to the environment are still not unavoidable, the latest being the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

All is not well for the leadership of the country. Investigative agency raids on a Union Minster and his associates and the hands of industrial lobbyists all over government decisions had left the countrymen bewildered if not lost.

The prolonged silence of the Valley was broken in Kashmir when the people especially the youth brigade took to stone pelting and the voices of resentment is finally reverberating throughout the mountains.

However, the magical moment of human excellence in the field of sports and engineering gave the layman something to be cheerful for. Spain emerged winners of the FIFA football world cup the undisputed numero uno game of the world. The Burj Khalifa - a tower of excellence and a marvel of engineering is perhaps the next step to the future.

Countdown to Extinction

A survey conducted by the Wildlife Protection Society of India has revealed that tigers in India are on the verge of extinction. Different NGOs have also done surveys of their own and have come out with grim results which depict that within a period of just eight months, we lost a total of 66 tigers. Tiger habitat in India is threatened and there are only 1411 tigers left in the country.

The national animal of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia and North and South Korea; the majestic creature at the heart of eastern and western culture is disappearing: it is being massacred for a lucrative illegal trade in traditional Chinese medicine. Shocking new figures show that parts of between 1,069 and 1,220 tigers were seized between 2000 and April this year – an average of at least 104 animals per year. The vast majority of seizures of parts from illegally killed tigers, including skeletons, claws and skins, were in India, China and Nepal, according to Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

Despite the trade in parts and skins being banned by the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), Chinese communities across Asia still use tiger parts in medicines and tonics.

Earlier this year, the Beijing-based World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies explicitly ruled it was not necessary to use tiger parts but the use of tigers in medicine has been illegal in China for 17 years and since then poaching has only escalated. There is clearly still a huge black market in China, Japan and South Korea, where, according to conservationists, a whole tiger can fetch more than $50,000 (£32,000).

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which flowed for three months in 2010. The impact of the spill continued even after the well was capped. It is the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The spill stemmed from a sea-floor oil gusher that resulted from the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion. The explosion killed 11 men working on the platform and injured 17 others.

Eight U.S. national parks are threatened, more than 400 species are at risk including the endangered Kemp’s Ridley Turtle, the Green Turtle, the Loggerhead Turtle, the Hawksbill Turtle, and the Leatherback Turtle. In the national refuges most at risk, about 34,000 birds have been counted. A comprehensive 2009 inventory of offshore Gulf species counted 15,700. The area of the oil spill has 8,332 species, including more than 1,200 fish, 200 birds, 1,400 molluscs, 1,500 crustaceans, 4 species of sea turtles, and 29 species of marine mammals.

Ayodhya Verdict

Sixty years after it first went to court, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court had pronounced judgment in the Ayodhya title suit, saying Hindus and Muslims are joint title holders.

The three-judge bench - comprising Justice S U Khan, Justice Sudhir Agarwal and Justice D V Sharma - ruled in a majority 2:1 judgment that there be a three-way division of the disputed land - one-third for the Sunni Waqf Board, one-third for the Nirmohi Akhara and one-third to the party for ‘Ram Lalla’.

The dispute before the court was whether the 41m by 24 m on a plot of 2.7 acres of disputed land on which the Babri Masjid stood before it was demolished on December 6th 1992 belongs to the Sunni Central Waqf Board or to the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha.

Bhopal Gas

Tragedy Verdict

The verdict on the Bhopal gas tragedy was a cause of unrest among the survivors as the seven guilty officials of Union Carbide plant and the company itself were bailed out within minutes for the 1984 gas disaster that killed thousands of people. The court which tried the seven officials of Union Carbide India, sentenced them to two years in jail and imposed a fine of Rs.100,000.

Union Carbide India Ltd (UCIL) from whose pesticide plant tonnes of lethal gas leaked on the nights of Dec 2-3, 1984, killed about 3,500 instantly and thousands later.

KASHMIR VIOLENCE

A frustrated new generation of stone-throwing Kashmiris has become the focus of resistance to Indian rule, superceding the militants who made the Kashmir region one of the most dangerous places on Earth in the 1990s. 2010 saw a renewed spurt of violence in Kashmir. Decades of on-off political dialogue about the status of the disputed territory have yielded few rewards and no end to the deadlock. This had bred frustration among the residents which boiled over as 2010 became the year in which Kashmir was engulfed by violence.

2G Spectrum Scam

It was alleged that under the tenure of Telecom Minister A Raja, 2G licenses were issued at throw away prices which cost the government Rs. 1.76 lakh crore. It was also alleged that the entry fee for spectrum licenses in 2008 were pegged at 2001 prices. Also, no proper auction was followed for the sale of spectrum rather, a system of first come – first served was followed. Niira Radia a corporate lobbyist was questioned by the CBI over her alleged involvement in the scam and had conducted search operations at her residence. Radia had hit the spotlight after taped telephonic conversations with various influential people regarding the 2G scam surfaced. The BJP which is always at loggerheads with the ruling Congress party has also mounted pressure on the latter and had stated that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should face a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe into the 2G Spectrum scam failing which he should resign on moral grounds.

IPL Fiasco

2010 was the year in which the Indian Premier League was mired in allegations of corruption and money laundering.

A Union minister, Shashi Tharoor, had resigned from the Indian government after allegations were made that a friend, Dubai-based businesswoman Sunanda Pushkar, had been given equity in the IPL’s expansion team in Kochi which the minister had helped set up. The Indian Government had in the meantime launched a financial investigation into the league.

A report on all this activity was handed to the Finance Ministry after which the Indian press reported that it contained allegations of match-fixing as well as of a series of financial irregularities including foreign exchange violations, tax evasion, proxy ownership of teams, and sweetheart deals for relatives and friends of politicians and cricket organizers and administrators.

XIX Commonwealth Games

The 2010 Commonwealth Games were held in Delhi, India, from 3 to 14 October 2010 and witnessed the participation of a total of 6,081 athletes from 71 Commonwealth nations and dependencies in 21 sports and 272 events. It was the largest international multi-sport event to be staged in Delhi and India, eclipsing the Asian Games in 1951 and 1982.

Initially, several concerns and controversies surfaced before the start of the Games. Despite these concerns, all member nations of the Commonwealth of Nations participated in the event, except Fiji and Tokelau and the Games were concluded successfully.

The initial total budget estimated by Indian Olympic Association in 2003 for hosting the Games was 16.2 billion (US$364.5 million) but escalated official total budget estimation in 2010 became 115 bn ($2.6 B).

FIFA

World Cup 2010

The 2010 FIFA World Cup was the 19th FIFA World Cup which took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010.

The matches were played in ten stadiums in nine host cities around the country, with the final played at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg. Thirty-two teams qualified for the tournament. Five new stadiums were built for the tournament, and five of the existing venues were upgraded. After the final match of the tournament, Spain emerged as World Champions over the Netherlands.

Burj Khalifa

Burj Khalifa previously known as Burj Dubai in Dubai, United Arab Emirates is the tallest man-made structure ever built, at 828 m (2,717 ft).

Construction began on 21st September 2004 and the building was officially opened on 4th January 2010 at a total cost of about US$1.5 billion dollars.

Over 45,000 m3 (58,900 cu yd) of concrete, weighing more than 110,000 tonnes was used to construct the concrete and steel foundation, which features 192 piles, with each pile of 1.5 metre diameter x 43 metre long buried more than 50 m (164 ft) deep. Burj Khalifa’s construction used 330,000 m3 of concrete and 55,000 tonnes of steel rebar, and construction took 22 million man-hours.