Smoky lives and dangerous lives!

The average rural household kitchen are something like this. Smoky stoves, blackened kitchen, blood-shot eyes of the woman of the house!. Every year, thousands of women are affected due to indoor air pollution and suffer from respiratory diseases like pneumonia, chronic respiratory disease and lung cancer with out being aware of the fact that their kitchen are killing them inch by inch.

The World Health Organization mentions that "More than half of the world’s population rely on dung, wood, crop waste or coal to meet their most basic energy needs. Cooking and heating with such solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys leads to indoor air pollution. This indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants including small soot or dust particles that are able to penetrate deep into the lungs. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can exceed acceptable levels for small particles in outdoor air 100-fold. Exposure is particularly high among women and children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth. Every year, indoor air pollution is responsible for the death of 1.6 million people - that's one death every 20 seconds".




The Centre for Ecology & Rural Development (CERD) has been installing highly fuel efficient, smokeless stoves and this was one place in Sivaganga district where we installed a stove.

A little investment on a fuel efficient, smokeless chulah can save the precious lives of our women and children.

First known use of Telescope in Indian Soil.

First known use of Telescope in India

We now know that Galileo used the Telescope in the year 1609 and this year we are celebrating the 400th year of the telescope. We also saw in the earlier post that Thomas Harriot used the telescope earlier to Galileo and his sketches of moon are available in the public domain too.

Now it will be interesting to see, when the telescope was used in India. It was generally believed that the French Jesuit Father Jean Richaud was the first person to use a telescope in India in 1689 with a telescope of about 12 feet focus. Richaud observed a comet during 1699 December and discoverd that the Alpha Centauri is a double star. He also estimated the latitude and longitude of Pondicherry. But a paper by RK Kochhar of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics which appeared in the Indian Journal of History of Science 24(3): 186-192 (1989) points that it was not Father Richaud who used the telescope first in India.

IT was Jeremiah Shakerley who was born in 1626 at Yorkshire, England who used the telescope first in Indian soil. He emigrated to Surat in India. East India Company had already set up its first trading post at Surat in 1612. It was from Surat that Shakerley observed the transit of Mercury in the year 1651. It is believed that Shakerley died in 1655 in Surat.


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