-Article-14.com As the Supreme Court demands an oxygen-supply plan from the Centre, caught off guard by an exploding pandemic, the Collector of a remote, tribal district tells us how he set up five oxygen plants ahead of the second Covid wave. New Delhi: In a hearing on 5 May 2021, the Supreme Court asked the Centre to, within a day, present a plan to provide hospitals of Delhi the 900 metric tonnes...

-TheWire.in In an interview for The Wire, the former ICRISAT scientist says the damage could have been contained if the government had acted promptly to warnings. The desert locust is a deadly agricultural pest that has been on a feeding spree across North Africa, West Asia and South Asia. Lore and mentions of locust swarms exist in the Mahabharata, the Bible and the Quran. But it has been largely absent from the...

-Scroll.in/ The Third Pole Flash-flood warnings routed through NGOs are giving border villages precious lead-time to escape the wrath of suddenly rising rivers. In the last few weeks of June, a series of WhatsApp messages were sent from Bhutan to India to warn cross-border friends downstream of the Aai, Saralbhanga and Manas rivers about cloud-bursts, swollen rivers and possible flash floods affecting people in the Indian state of Assam. Although originating from officials,...

-Livemint.com The production of ‘mahua’ is finally entering the formal economy as new initiatives seek to upscale this indigenous drink, selling it across the country and even the globe It is a cloudy morning in Nangur village in Bastar district, Chattisgarh. It is a settlement of a little over 400 families, considered fairly large in these parts. We make a bumpy journey down a narrow, unpaved road intermittently shaded by sargi (sal)...

-The Hindu An estimated 10 million people in nine districts of West Bengal drink arsenic-laden groundwater. Priyanka Pulla finds that despite alarms having been sounded over decades, the State government has moved at a glacial pace to tackle the crisis, while people struggle to cope with the symptoms On a Thursday morning at the government primary school in Madhusudankati, a village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, a gaggle of five-year-olds...