-Scroll.in The unprecedented reversal comes after 15 years of steady progress by India in reducing infant deaths On November 8, 2016, the Indian government undertook a drastic policy decision, choosing to ban high value currency notes in circulation. Overnight, 86% of India’s currency became worthless, throwing live and livelihoods in disarray. Now new research is pointing to the widespread impact this dislocation might have had on human development. A new paper by economists...

A report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which was released on July 6th (observed as World Zoonoses Day by research institutions and non-governmental organisations across the globe) this year, says that around 60 percent of known infectious diseases in humans are estimated to have an animal origin. Likewise, almost three-fourth of all new and emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic i.e. these diseases...

-Down to Earth Sharad Chandra, director, flood forecast monitoring division, Central Water Commission, spoke to DTE on increasing instances of urban flooding   Urban flooding is increasingly becoming a common occurrence in India, the latest victim being Hyderabad. The city received unusually heavy rainfall October 13-14, 2020, Due to a deep depression that developed in the Bay of Bengal. Heavy damage to property, roads and human lives were reported. Experts have argued that...

-Down to Earth These cities would have to build ‘resilience’ if they were to manage such scarcity, the nonprofit said A hundred cities worldwide, including 30 in India, face the risk of ‘severe water scarcity’ by 2050, according to a recent report by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) The cities would face a ‘grave water risk’ by 2050 Due to a dramatic increase in their population percentage to 51 per cent by...

-Financial Express Only three crops -- groundnut, jowar and moong -- have recorded higher arrivals on year (see chart). Even in the case of jowar and moong, arrivals fell in the largest-producing states of Maharashtra (-39%) and Rajasthan (-7%), respectively. Amid the row over the three new federal farm laws aimed at giving unfettered market access to farmers, the producers of various crops seem to have started to rely much less on...