-Hindustan Times The international study includes data from Indian rural areas while MEAsuring the impact of some weather events on suicides. Not only drought but flooding or even extreme rainfall leading to excess water availability is linked to higher cases of suicides among those above the age of 15 years in rural areas, a new study has suggested. In an analysis of 9,456 suicides between 2001 and 2013 in randomly selected rural areas,...

-Down to Earth Freshwater wildlife down 84%; Latin America, the Caribbean particularly hit The population of vertebrate species declined by around 68 per cent between 1970 and 2016, said the Living Planet Report 2020 released by international non-profit World Wide Fund for Nature September 10, 2020. The Living Planet Index (LPI) — a MEAsure of the state of the world’s biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species in terrestrial, freshwater and...

-The Hindu Despite finding huge favour in India, the GM crop has only brought modest benefits Cotton has been woven and used in India for thousands of years. Cotton fabric from around 3,000 BCE has been excavated from the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, and archaeological findings in Mehrgarh, Pakistan, show that cotton was used in the subcontinent as far back as 5,000 BCE. Indian cotton fabrics dominated the world trade during the succeeding...

-ThePrint.in It took the SC 10 years to say that an unjust order on sub-quotas needed a rethink. And then another six years for a Justice Arun Mishra-led bench to say the court may have been wrong. The last thing you expect me to do in these times is to welcome a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Arun Mishra’s bench. But it so happens that among the various questionable and controversial orders...

-Livemint.com Rural India was battling economic difficulties even before the pandemic. The pandemic-induced lockdown increased hardships even further. The historic contraction in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) figure for the June-ended quarter has raised several questions on what the future holds, and what that contraction has MEAnt for ordinary people. Macro-economic statistics can often fail to capture the diverse realities of a country as large as India, and hence it is useful...