-Livemint.com While there has been progress in providing electricity to rural households, there have been no real efforts to improve the quality of power supply Delivering electricity to nearly every village in India has been one of the most celebrated achievements of the Narendra Modi government. However, a study by Sreekumar Nhalur and others published in the latest Economic and Political Weekly suggests it may be too soon to celebrate. The authors argue...

-The Hindu Environment Ministry and inland waterways body differed on need for clearances India’s longest waterway project, one terminal of which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this week, was made possible only after a high-power Committee of Ministers and senior officials from multiple Ministries overruled the recommendations of experts appointed by the Environment Ministry. The latter had recommended public consultations and a full-fledged environment clearance, documents made available through...

-TheWire.in While no one can argue that India may moving in the right direction in terms of sanitation, all is not well. Despite increasing focus by the government and programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, unsafe sanitation work, loosely captured under the catch-all phrase manual scavenging, still exists in India. There are five million people employed in sanitation work of some sort in India with about two million of them working...

-Livemint.com The pollution problem is about the allocation of right resources in the right areas. It is a political problem more than an economic one Delhi starts to become dystopian, a few weeks before Diwali, and this continues for around a month after the festival of lights. The conventional explanation for the Delhi smog (in fact, it impacts large parts of North India) is the burning of rice straw by the farmers...

-The Hindu The deluge in Kerala was made worse by inefficient management of 34 dams The people of Kerala have braved the worst calamity since the great flood of 1924. The floodwaters have receded from most of the affected areas barring Kuttanad. Most people have gone back to their homes from relief camps, only to find them battered beyond redemption. As the State is coming back to a “new normal” after the...