-The New York Times blog You could be pardoned for thinking that light pollution is someone’s idea of a Diwali joke. With concerns about rising air pollution hanging over India’s capital like the thick blanket of smog that appeared a few weeks ago and activists against noise pollution jostling to be heard over the burst of holiday firecrackers, the relatively benign problem of light pollution may not seem too important. But astronomers in...

-The Hindu Wrapped in a shawl turned grey from grime, the three-month-old baby girl was brought to meet this correspondent near the Taimur Nagar police post. “How do you like her,” the girl’s maternal aunt, Rahima, asked. “I know she is too skinny, so she looks horrible. But one month of proper food, and she will turn healthy. Look, her features are so sharp.” Rahima had made contact hoping to sell the...

-The Hindustan Times Environmentalists have been telling us about the presence of DDT residues in human Milk and even traces of it in the blood of penguins. This tells us how widespread the use and abuse of this chemical is, but it took us more than 40 years to realise that DDT is a harmful persistent organic pollutant. While the effort is to phase out the harmful chemical, I am worried about the...

-The Indian Express A report submitted in the Supreme Court on Friday indicted the Maharashtra government and Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan over a “close nexus between politicians, contractors and bureaucrats,” facilitating extensive wrongdoings in supply of supplementary nutrition to children through the Central government-sponsored Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). The report, prepared by the principal adviser to SC-appointed Commissioner Biraj Patnaik, also highlighted that in Uttar Pradesh, supply of supplementary nutrition has...

-The Hindu The comprehensive clean-up that the public sector oil marketing companies recently initiated in the liquefied petroleum gas distribution system is a commendable if long overdue effort to check what had evidently become a free-for-all game. Groaning under the “subsidy burden” in a market sector where consumption levels of the convenience fuel had skyrocketed over the decades, the companies first moved collectively to computerise data with regard to LPG consumers...