Environment & Ecology Quiz: Environmental Laws and Bodies in India

On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the pesticide plant of Union Carbide India Limited at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, killing thousands of people and injuring many more.

Founded in 1948 and based in Switzerland, it maintains the Red List of Threatened Species, which grades species as least concern, near threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild or extinct.

The Stockholm Convention was adopted in 2001 and came into force in 2004.

The National Clean Air Programme was launched by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in January 2019 as a national framework to cut particulate pollution in cities that do not meet the national ambient air quality standards.

The Act was passed in the wake of the Bhopal gas tragedy and gives the central government a general power to take any measure it considers necessary to protect and improve the quality of the environment.

The National Green Tribunal Act was passed in 2010 and the tribunal began work in the same year, to provide quick and specialised disposal of cases on environmental protection and forest conservation.

The Board was created by that Act to advise the central government, to lay down standards for effluents and to coordinate the work of the State Pollution Control Boards, which were set up by the same law in the states.

The Authority was set up under the Biological Diversity Act of 2002 and is based at Chennai in Tamil Nadu.

It added Article 48A to the directive principles, asking the state to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard forests and wildlife, and Article 51A, clause g, to the fundamental duties, laying the same obligation on every citizen.

The convention was signed in 1971 at Ramsar, a town in Iran, and is the oldest of the modern global conservation treaties.

The Montreal Protocol was adopted under the Vienna Convention of 1985 and sets a timetable for phasing out chlorofluorocarbons, halons and similar chemicals.

Set up in 1981 and based at Dehradun, it assesses the country's forest and tree cover from satellite data and brings out the India State of Forest Report once every two years, giving the cover state by state and by density class.