-Livemint.com Tractor sales have gone up in a year which has seen farmer protests in several states for remunerative crop prices and farm loan waivers, amid lingering effects of demonetisation and GST implementation New Delhi: Domestic tractor sales rose to a record in the first half of the fiscal year, but economists are hesitating to interpret it as a sign that the farm economy has finally Turned the corner. Tractor manufacTurers sold 363,071...

-Deccan Chronicle Maintaining green cover (not just trees, but also grass and small plants) is a big challenge in Delhi due to the shortage of water. With the quality of Delhi’s air has again reached critical levels with severe pollution, alarm bells have gone off, and the Delhi government announced it would bring back the “odd-even” scheme, that seems to be Turning into an annual ritual. (The plan has been temporarily kept...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...

-Livemint.com Farm activists, environmentalists spar with pesticide companies over cause of more than 40 deaths Mumbai: The deaths of over 40 farmers and farm workers in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region since July has put the spotlight on the abuse of pesticides and lack of protection for those spraying them, even as a committee investigating the case prepares to submit its findings this week. A seven-member special investigation team (SIT) formed by the Maharashtra government...

-Firstpost.com Delhiites are cursed by geography to be prone to a meteorological phenomenon called inversion where warm air rests above the colder air closer to the ground, preventing it from mixing upwards thereby trapping all that we put into it – almost like a lid Delhi’s pollution episodes at this time of the year have become an annual affair - the latest one has the Chief Minister comparing Delhi to a gas...