-The Hindu Business Line Policy deficit. The widening trade deficit with China points to a weakness in India’s industrial growth path It was headline news when Chinese customs statistics at the end of September 2022 indicated that for a second calendar year, India’s trade with China would settle at well above $100 billion. That was only partly because of the positive implications of burgeoning trade between the two countries that only two...

-The Hindu The National Suicide Prevention Strategy must cascade down to every district The best first step towards addressing a malaise is to recognise that it exists. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s recently published National Suicide Prevention Strategy fits right there. It has been a long time coming, but the Strategy, finally in the public realm, calls Attention to the massive burden of suicides in the country, and initiates steps...

-The Telegraph Amphan changed the institutional knowledge of the Sunderbans folks. The Telegraph recounts how they lived the countdown to Cyclone Sitrang Gobardhanpur: Shankar Das is taking stock of the luggage for the last time. Hurriedly, with fear-ridden eyes. Outside, the wind speed is changing. It will take time to reach the school building on the village outskirts. His family will accompany him. If it gets late, there might be no space...

-The India Forum The annual public debate over the poorly constructed Global Hunger Index is all hot air; in the process the critical issue of child undernutrition in India, where authentic data is available showing very slow improvement, gets ignored. In the seminal book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen lamented that "social failures that are of enormous importance for development" received scant Attention in public...

-Down to Earth The United Nations declared 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration In this Anthropocene era, human interference can be seen in every component of Earth’s ecosystem. Due to such human-mediated changes, the loss of freshwater habitats such as lakes, ponds and wetlands, as well as their aquatic biodiversity and water quality are becoming a major concern.  Freshwater ecosystems are of enormous ecological importance and human need (such as drinking water and...