Survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy on Thursday organized a 'Bhopal Special Olympics' to protest against Dow Chemical's sponsorship of the London Olympics, calling out the multinational for spending money on advertising while victims of the accident touted as the world's worst industrial disaster continue to suffer.

According to the Times of India, some 45 children with physical and mental disabilities, part of the second generation of victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy, participated in the games -- which included a wheel-chair race, crab walking and softball throw.

In the leadup to the London Olympics, a number of organizations called for Dow Chemical to be barred from sponsoring the Games, and there was a grassroots push for India to boycott the event if the company did not drop its bid. But in the end, nothing came of the effort.

Not a single political leader, not even the local member of the legislative assembly, showed up for the Bhopal Special Olympics, the paper said.

Dow Chemical acquired the assets and liabilities of Union Carbide in 2001. But Dow has never taken responsibility for cleaning up the environmental damage or met local demands for compensation. 

India set aside 900 megawatts of power and ensured a stockpile of diesel fuel will be available for farmers in its breadbasket states to pump up groundwater for irrigation, as the country's metereological department downgraded its outlook for the summer monsoon.

After a new report debunked its claims that the hopelessly flawed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor has speeded up bus travel and reduced accidents in the city, the Delhi government has pleaded that the project cannot be scrapped lest its failure affect other transit systems planned around the country.

Absurd? That's the sort of logic that the BRT has been following since it was first suggested.

I'll get into the new Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) report in a moment. But here are the real reasons that the BRT has been a complete failure.

1. They built it in the wrong place.

The not-so-secret agenda of the BRT planners was to convince middle class commuters to shift from cars to the bus, so they put the first route smack in the middle of wealthy South Delhi, which has a greater percentage of car owners than any other part of the city, as well as (once) some of its widest and therefore least congested roads.  This meant that the system was going to irritate a powerful lobby from the outset, and also that its usefulness to the lower class / lower middle class bus riders would not be immediately evident. 

2. They started a "trial run" when the thing was half-finished.

This was an incredibly boneheaded move, because it ensured that there would be no upside to the corridor. The jams were particularly bad where the bus lanes began -- an obvious bottleneck -- and because the corridor didn't actually deliver riders to their destination, even for bus goeers it was essentially a short, smooth ride in between the usual stop-and-go.

3. They didn't increase the number / frequency of buses.

Leave it to engineers who don't commute by bus to miss the one crucial fact about bus travel: It's not the bus ride that takes forever, it's waiting for the bus to come in the first place. So when the BRT opened for business, car owners would sit -- parked, for all intents and purposes -- in the car lane, waiting for 15 or 20 minutes before a bus would whiz by in the empty "rapid transit" corridor. 

4. They didn't link the thing to the Metro.

Indian readers will recall that the BRT began amid a slanging match over whether buses or a subway system was the most practical a cost-effective way to convert Delhi to a public transportation city. This was stupid, since the answer was "all of the above." But it also meant that the BRT and the Metro essentially developed independent from one another. If the first leg of the BRT had taken riders directly to a major Metro exchange, both systems might have leveraged added riders. And the BRT, in particular, might have gotten a boost from the Metro's street cred with the middle class.

5. There was no stick and no carrot.

Not only was the BRT not actually faster than taking your car or bike -- since you'd have to first get to the BRT line, which lacked the commuter parking lots present at Metro stations. But apart from the traffic jams that it created, there was no punishment for continuing to drive: Parking fees remain as low as 20 U.S. cents an hour (or unlimited period) in many high-traffic areas; license fees for cars are low, and not collected annually; the cops rarely issue parking tickets or tow cars; and there is no charge for bringing your car into the city center, such as exists in London or Singapore.

India's Western Ghats mountain range -- a biodiversity hot spot whose forests are older than those of the Himalayas -- has been named a World Heritage Site.

Delhi is undergoing a water crisis this month, as neighboring states have decided to cut us off. More power to them, I say. But, then, I haven't run out of water yet.

In fact, my Delhi Development Authority "colony" spills hundreds of gallons into the drains every morning because nobody can be bothered to turn off the pumps. (In India's capital, we get water for an hour or so a day, and pump our supply up to tanks on the roof).

A glacial lake burst Saturday in the Nepalese Himalayas, causing a flash flood that killed at least 13 people and left 60 more unaccounted for, PTI reports.

Another signal of the potentially deadly mounting cost of climate change, the flash flood, like several other glacial lakes that have burst in China, is believed to be the result of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

The torrent swept away houses, farms and cattle near the tourist resort of Pokhara, and three Russian trekkers were among the missing, PTI said.

This is the first glacial lake to burst within Nepal.