The Hindu Businessline India’s urea production has surged by 25.6 per cent during the first month of the current fiscal to 23.45 lakh tonnes (lt), thanks to the revival of four closed plants in the public sector at Gorakhpur, Sindri, Barauni, and Ramagundam. However, sales were lower at 11.77 lt in April from year-ago, which indicates its comfortable availability as farmers normally rush to store the crop nutrient ahead of sowing...

People's Archive of Rural India Marudupudi Nagaraju has a three-acre mango orchard in Pomula Bheemavaram village in Andhra Pradesh. A daily wage worker of the Madiga community, this land was assigned to him around 25 years ago by the state government. It was done in a move by the state to redistribute land among the landless classes introduced under the Andhra Pradesh Land Reforms (Ceiling on Agricultural Holdings) Act, 1973. hen...

Human-caused climate change made April's record-breaking heatwaves in Bangladesh, India, Laos, and Thailand at least 30 times more likely, according to an analysis conducted by a group of leading climate scientists. The study by World Weather Attribution also emphasises that the region's high vulnerability, known as a heatwave hotspot, exacerbated the impacts of the heatwave. During April, parts of south and southeast Asia faced an intense heatwave, reaching unprecedented temperatures exceeding 42...

KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

S.V. Subramanian, Mayanka Ambade, Smriti Sharma, Akhil Kumar, Rockli Kim The extent of food deprivation and insecurity among infants and young children—a critical phase for children's current and future health and well-being—in India is unknown. We estimate the prevalence of food deprivation among infants and young children in India and describe its evolution over time at sub-national levels. Data from five National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) conducted in 1993, 1999, 2006, 2016...