-The Telegraph The country has an advantage that many people have two vaccines plus a past infection: Expert Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan who has been tracking India’s Covid-19 epidemic for nearly two years, is now visiting her parents’ farmhouse in Ruppur near Santiniketan in Birbhum. “This is our escape and solace in the epidemic,” she said. In this interview, Mukherjee tells The Telegraph what she expects...

-The Hindu Business Line Agriculture is too diverse a subject for it to be compressed into a sub-section of the regular budgets of the Centre and States During the last five years, the Budget allocation to agriculture has seen positive shifts consistent with the Centre’s role in research, marketing, exports, and agricultural education. In the light of the farm reform Bills’ repeal, is it not the right time to formulate a separate...

-Down to Earth Ganjam, known to be severely affected by child marriages, is Odisha’s first district to be declared child marriage free Odisha’s Ganjam district was declared child marriage-free January 3, 2022, district collector Vijay Amruta Kulange said. “We decided to declare the district free of child marriage after collecting detailed information about all weddings that took place in 2020 and 2021,” Kulange said at an event organised at the district headquarters. The district...

-The Telegraph According to the annual reports, funding for the scheme has been declining over the past five years as it has been declared 'closed' The University Grants Commission has stopped several research projects while some are lying dormant allegedly because of lack of funds from the Centre. The Major Research Project (MRP) of higher education regulator UGC is a case in point. According to the annual reports of the UGC, funding for the...

-Down to Earth There were 5.18 excess deaths per 1,000 people in Chennai between March 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021: The Lancet India’s poor disease surveillance measures during the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic have made it hard to gauge the burden of mortality. A study, published in The Lancet in December 2021, looked at all-cause mortality in Chennai and found 5.18 excess deaths per 1,000 people between March 1, 2020...