-HinDustan Times Delhi air pollution hit severe levels on Tuesday, prompting officials to shut down junior sections in schools and recommend a four-fold hike in parking fees as well as a cut in Metro fares. New Delhi gasped for oxygen on Tuesday as a toxic haze reduced visibility, affected flights and trains, and prompted chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to describe the national capital as a “gas chamber”. (Highlights) Delhi education minister Manish Sisodia...

-HinDustan Times Brown planthoppers have been particularly pestilent in the kharif season this year. Distressed farmers from the nine affected districts in Odisha are setting fire to their destroyed crops. Bargarh: Landless farmer Brunda Sahoo’s hopes soared early October when he saw lush green paddy crop standing on 15 acres he cultivated as a sharecropper. He told his family they could repair their house and marry off his daughter after selling...

-The Indian Express Jindal, Adani, Vedanta are Big Three who transport coal from Mormugao Port. Over four months, Indian Express tracks three key routes to find a trail of health hazards, environmental damage. Panjim: Nearly 25 million tonnes of coal — evenly spread across a standard football field, this toxic black mountain will rise almost 3 km into the sky. That is the amount that will be unloaded each year at the...

-The Pioneer Diwali is four days away, and the state of Delhi’s air has gone to the dogs with the National Air Quality Index (NAQI) stating on Sunday that air pollution has spiked to severest “dark red”, strengthening arguments of many who claimed that the Supreme Court was “misled into believing that banning firecrackers during Diwali would clean city’s air”. The worsening pollution level substantiates their argument that the problem lies somewhere...

-NDTV Jean Dreze's new book, a collection of essays called 'Sense and Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone', starts with a beautiful and moving description of what he sees from his office in Ranchi University at the crack of dawn: hundreds of informal sector coal-miners in Ranchi trudging miles with heavy loads of coal they have dug up, often from below the land from which they were forcibly displaced. Dreze quotes...