-Hindustan Times New Delhi: About half of Delhi would have flattened out had the epicentre of Saturday's morning earthquake been in or near the national capital. DK Paul, professor emeritus at IIT Roorkee's earthquake engineering department and part of the team that carried out a microzonation study of the capital in 2007, told HT that devastation in Delhi would be many times more not only on account of its high seismicity (it...

-Hindustan Times Fatehgarh Sahib: The burning of crops by farmers was causing loss to nutrients worth Rs 350 crore in the state alone besides causing environmental pollution and damaging biodiversity, said Dr AK Dhawan, director of Central Soil and Materials Research Station. Dhawan was here as a part of the zonal monitoring committee of the Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA), Hyderabad that visited Badhouchhi Kalan village in the district to...

-Hindustan Times Hamirpur/ Jalaun/ Banda: The dangerous sand mafia stops at nothing. It kills, runs over men in uniform, kidnaps and, in Uttar Pradesh, even molests and rapes. Its impunity stems from the fact, as an HT investigation found, that complaints lodged with police often remain confined to files. Shivpal Singh, gram pradhan of Bansariya village, testifies to the mafia’s dominance. “In March 2014, the musclemen of a kingpin sexually assaulted two women...

-Hindustan Times Some global meteorological agencies have pointed to the rising risks of an El Nino weather pattern this year which can trigger a poor monsoon in India, potentially posing an immediate challenge for the Narendra Modi government. El Nino, literally “little boy” in Spanish, is a climate phenomenon marked by higher sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. Its effects vary, from storms in California to drought in Australia and India. ...

-Hindustan Times The government appears to be having second thoughts about throwing the rulebook at officials who are a little late to work, as long as they do their job well and don’t mind staying back if there is a deadline to meet. The department of personnel & training (DoPT) had last year made it mandatory for central government offices in Delhi to implement the Aadhaar-based biometric attendance system from January 1,...