-The Wire Science NASA released a satellite image last year showing that India, with China, is “greening the world”. The greening has been thanks to the colonial ideologies that have bequeathed the legacy of greening India, which has been upheld by the subsequent governments. The British drafted the FIRst National Forest Policy for India to convert its forests into timber production stands. Decades later, the Indian government safeguarded these stands with...

-Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, January-June, 2020 This note analyses the impact of the lockdown – which brought almost all economic and public activity in India to a halt – on a select group of villages based on a rapid assessment survey conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) in April 2020. The survey was conducted through telephone interviews of 52 informants from 21 villages across 10...

-Hindustan Times The government has undermined secular democracy; social justice; federalism; and economic self-reliance Surreal is, perhaps, the only way to describe marking of the FIRst anniversary of the Modi 2.0 government. As the government data detailing the pre-coronavirus disease destruction of the economy and the consequent ruination of crores of lives during the last year was being released, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi was writing to all of us describing the...

-The Indian Express A meaningful comparison of India with its largest neighbours — Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — is a much better way to understand the spread of the pandemic and assess the effectiveness of responses to contain it. A comparison of India’s situation with its neighbours is much more meaningful than the comparisons regularly put out by the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, where India is almost always...

-NDTV India is battling the worst desert locust outbreak in recent times. Swarms of locusts FIRst attacked Rajasthan and have now spread to Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. New Delhi: The Delhi government on Thursday warned of a possible locust invasion and asked authorities to spray insecticides and pesticides on crops, vegetation, gardens and orchards while several states in western and central India struggled to contain the worst infestation in nearly...