-Live Mint While natural disasters grab our attention, everyday events like illness drag most people into poverty  In a small town of Gujarat, I met Chandibai, a woman, about 50 years of age. Fifteen years previously, her husband, Gokalji, had owned a general-purpose shop in the town centre. The family also owned a house and some agricultural land. In 1989, Gokalji developed an illness that confined him to bed, sometimes at home...

-The Times of India The warning is ominous — climate change and global warming will make vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria - already causing havoc in the country more lethal. A landmark report on climate change and health, published by the World Health Organization on Monday, said that in the last 100 years, the world has warmed by approximately 0.75 degree Celsius. Over the last 25 years, the rate of global...

-DNA No one believes the news anymore. Who can blame them? The newspapers are so noisy, filled with scams and slanging matches, that even a top newspaper-bureaucrat like your columnist cringes while scanning the morning’s front pages. I too don’t want to read the papers. Then there’s the matter of credibility: the media is barely clinging to the last vestige of public trust, and that’s only because the institution of the...

-IPS News Environmental activists are cautiously optimistic that a call by a court-appointed technical committee for a ten-year moratorium on open field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops will shelve plans to introduce bio-engineered foods in this largely agricultural country. “We are now waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will accept the recommendations of its own committee at the next hearing on Oct. 29,” said Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Forum...

-The Hindustan Times The recent spurt in protests against projects from Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu to Mahan coal block in Madhya Pradesh to Tata’s Power Plant in Mundra, Gujarat, has raised a key question --- are American and European philanthropic groups supporting these agitations?   A conference organised by such groups from the two most developed regions of the world --- US and Europe --- in Istanbul this July provides an insight how...