-AP An earthquake had long been feared, not just because of the natural seismic fault, but because of the local, more human conditions that made it worse. Nepal’s devastating earthquake was the disaster experts knew was coming. Just a week ago, about 50 earthquake and social scientists from around the world had come to Kathmandu to get the area to prepare better for a big earthquake. “It was sort of a nightmare waiting to...

-The News Minute In 1996, when B K Uniyal went through the names of 700 accredited journalists in Delhi, he couldn’t identify a single Dalit among them. He realized that not once in his 30 years in the profession had he met a Dalit journalist. In 2013, Ajaz Ashraf found 21 across the country. On April 12, 2015, that tiny number shrunk even further with the death of Koppula Nagaraju, a...

-The Indian Express As the toll of human misery and suicide mounts, official estimates of farm losses due to unseasonal rains and hailstorms in March remain controversial, with hasty downward revision. Since these estimates are largely notional, without validation from field visits, such revision smacks of deliberate fiddling. On March 24, the agriculture ministry reported that crops on 18 million hectares — about 30 per cent of the rabi crops —...

-The News Minute Kerala: A group of 101 families has created a small yet strong challenge to the idea that farming requires modern science to thrive. Since 2006, Vengeri, a village in Kozhikode district, has revolutionized everyday living and has set an example by not only managing sustainable organic farming, challenging genetically modified crops and also efficient waste management practices. Thanks to Niravu, a residential association of 100 odd homes, today Vengeri is...

-New York Times Blog The earth beneath Lakshmi Karre’s sparse cotton crop is hard and dry. Dressed in a flowery orange sari, she squats in the large gap between two plants and tugs at some brittle leaves, turned speckled brown by a fungal disease known as cotton rust. “When I was young we used to get 100 cotton bolls per plant,” she says. “There was no gap between the plants. Now they...