What is the main aim of Montreal Protocol?

The correct answer is B, Vandana Shiva. Trained as a physicist, she turned to agriculture and founded Navdanya, a network of community seed banks that collects, stores and freely exchanges traditional varieties of rice, millet, pulses and oilseeds, and that campaigns against the patenting of seed and of plants long used in India. The name means nine seeds and stands for the diversity of a farm. Option A, Sunita Narain, directs the Centre for Science and Environment and is known for work on air pollution, vehicular emissions and water policy. Option C, Medha Patkar, leads the Narmada Bachao Andolan against large dams on the Narmada. Option D, Tulsi Gowda, is the Karnataka tree planter known as the encyclopaedia of the forest for her knowledge of seeds and saplings, honoured with the Padma Shri, but Navdanya is not hers.

The correct answer is B, the Tawa dam. The Tawa project on a tributary of the Narmada in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh brought canal irrigation to black cotton soil that already held water well. Within a few seasons the water table rose, fields became waterlogged and salts came to the surface, so yields fell instead of rising. The farmers organised the Mitti Bachao Abhiyan in 1977, demanding compensation and a change in the way water was released. Option A, the Bargi dam, is also on the Narmada, near Jabalpur, and is remembered for displacement rather than for waterlogging. Option C, the Indira Sagar dam at Punasa, was built much later. Option D, the Gandhi Sagar dam, is on the Chambal in the north of Madhya Pradesh and is unconnected with Hoshangabad. The lesson the movement taught was that irrigation without drainage ruins soil.

The correct answer is A, Majuli in Assam. From the late nineteen seventies Jadav Payeng planted saplings year after year on a bare, eroding sandbar of the Brahmaputra near Majuli, and the patch grew into a forest of several hundred hectares that is now called the Molai forest after him. It shelters deer, rhinoceros, tigers and a herd of elephants, and it holds the sand against the river. He was honoured with the Padma Shri. Option B, Divar, is an island in the Mandovi in Goa and has no such plantation. Option C, Sriharikota, is the barrier island in Andhra Pradesh that carries the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Option D, Munroe Island, lies in the Ashtamudi backwaters of Kerala and is known for its sinking land, not for a planted forest. Majuli itself is one of the largest river islands in the world.

The correct answer is B, the replacement of natural sal forest with teak. In 1982 the government proposed to convert the natural sal forests of Singhbhum, then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand, into plantations of teak, which fetches a far higher price as timber. For the tribal communities the sal forest was a source of leaves, seeds, fruit and grazing, so the teak plantation was nicknamed political teak and resisted. Option A is wrong because, although the Subarnarekha project did displace people in the region, the Jungle Bachao Andolan was about the forest and not the dam. Option C, iron-ore mining, is a real grievance in Singhbhum but came to the fore in later campaigns. Option D is wrong because no tiger reserve was at issue. Remember the pair: sal is what the tribals wanted and teak is what was imposed.

The correct answer is B, Sunderlal Bahuguna. He carried the Chipko message on foot across the Himalaya and summed up its argument in the phrase that ecology is permanent economy, meaning that a standing forest yields soil, water and pure air for ever while felled timber yields money once. He later led the long fast and campaign against the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi. Option A, Baba Amte, founded Anandwan for people affected by leprosy and supported the Narmada Bachao Andolan, but the slogan is not his. Option C, Salim Ali, is the Birdman of India, the ornithologist who wrote The Book of Indian Birds and whose intervention helped save the Bharatpur wetland. Option D, Kailash Sankhala, is remembered as the Tiger Man of India and as the first director of Project Tiger, not for this slogan.