-ThePrint.in While heavy rains have lashed parts of Assam and Meghalaya in the northeast, planting of rain-fed kharif crops has been delayed in Odisha, where the rain deficit is 39%. New Delhi: After a slow start, the four-month-long Southwest monsoon has finally turned normal, data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) shows. Compared to a 42 per cent deficit in rainfall recorded on 8 June, the monsoon entered normal territory Tuesday at 98...

-Hindustan Times The announcement came hours after 17 opposition parties decided to field former BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, currently with the Trinamool Congress, as its consensus candidate, after its first three choices demurred. Droupadi Murmu, the former governor of Jharkhand, will be the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) nominee for the July 18 Presidential election, and most likely the next President of the Republic. The decision to nominate her was taken at the...

-TheWire.in The Panjab Agriculture University study examined deaths by suicide among farmers between 2000 and 2018 in six districts of the state. Chandigarh: As many as 9,291 farmers died by suicide between 2000 and 2018 in six districts of Punjab, a Panjab Agriculture University (PAU) study published in the latest edition of Economic and Political Weekly has revealed. The districts surveyed were Sangrur, Bathinda, Ludhiana, Mansa, Moga and Barnala. Heavy debt – most incurred...

-The Hindu A multinational study including NIMS nephrologist concludes the finding Hyderabad: Farmers and daily wage labourers working in burned sugarcane could be at the risk of developing Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown etiology (CKDu). A multinational original research article, including a nephrologist from Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) in Telangana, India, has concluded that ‘human exposure to amorphous silica nanoparticles found in burned  sugarcane fields could have a participatory role...

-Livemint.com Mahalanobis gave our data system global recognition and we must ask why we lost that credibility In the summer of 1946, at the ‘nuclear’ session of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), a representative of a British colony made an impassioned plea for laying down globally accepted standards for conducting large-scale sample surveys. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis argued that household surveys would become invaluable data sources for many developing countries that were...