-Livemint.com Only 20% of Delhi’s air pollution can be attributed to stubble burning by farmers in Punjab and Haryana, environment minister Anil Madhav Dave said on Monday New Delhi: The spike in pollution levels in Delhi’s air is an annual winter ordeal, so is burning of paddy stubble by farmers in neighbouring Punjab and Haryana after the crop is harvested. But how much does burning of crop residues contribute to Delhi’s pollution peaks?...

-The Hindu Business Line The spread of rural electrification has been overestimated, and the adoption of subsidised LPG has not picked up It is little more than a year since the Sustainable Development Goals were agreed to at the UN General Assembly. SDGs are a set of 17 goals that are intended to dramatically improve lives across the world by 2030. A major goal is SDG7 which aims to ensure universal access...

-The Indian Express The fires are so many and so widespread that satellites flying hundreds of kilometres above the Earth record their presence. New Delhi: North India faces an annual trauma as winter approaches — the air in the region having more than 200 million people becomes toxic. Fingers are pointed at the hand that feeds India, farmers in the granary of the country are rebuked asking them not to burn agriculture...

-The Hindu Fine particulate matter from industries, cars and biomass causing premature mortality. Air pollution could have killed at least 600,000 Indians in 2012, a study conducted by the World Health Organisation and made public on Monday said. That is about a fifth of the 3 million who died worldwide because they were exposed to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) that may have aggravated or been directly responsible for cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer. India...

-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...