Environmental geotechnology: An indian perspective

Infrastructure development and industrialisation have led to an ever increasing demand for energy and tremendous generation of industrial and municipal solid wastes in India. With indiscriminate human encroachments, the impact of disasters such as rainfall-induced landslides, river/coastal erosion, flash floods and cloud bursts is quite high. In order to minimise the harmful impact of these issues, there needs to be development of sustainable optimal solutions, which are best suited to the regions concerned, employment of new construction materials like geosynthetics and state-of-the-art techniques. As such, in dealing with such problems that have direct bearing on geoenvironment, an interdisciplinary approach needs to be developed, which is the starting point of environmental geotechnology as ‘applied science to research and resolve’. In view of this, this paper discusses a few key geoenvironmental engineering issues and challenges pertaining to the Indian context.