-The Hindu Business Line They await a comprehensive relief and rehabilitation package from the Centre “The governments here have been asleep for far too long. They should listen to us and solve our problems. If they can’t, they should just go,” thundered Vidya More, a 38-year-old farmer widow from Osmanabad district of Maharashtra. Her frustration is understandable; her husband committed suicide about eight years ago when he couldn’t get enough from his two-acre...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday announced ex-gratia payment of Rs 2 lakh to the next of kin of farmers and labourers who died due to pesticide inhalation while spraying crops in Yavatmal district over the last few weeks. An inquiry has also been ordered into the matter under the assistant chief secretary (home). Eighteen farmers were killed due to inhalation of 'profefonos', a pesticide used on...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: As many as 882 deaths in five years, nearly four-fifths of them in a single state. These statistics do not pertain to some inexorable natural calamities. These are figures of tribal children who lost their lives in state-run residential schools across the country between 2010 and 2015. These are numbers of innocent lives lost seemingly on account of sheer official apathy, manifest in the lack of basic...

-The Telegraph Chennai: Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) has agreed to compensate nearly 600 former employees who were exposed to toxic mercury in a thermometer factory that had been relocated from New York to Tamil Nadu by another investor in 1984 following environmental concerns in the US. The thermometer factory is located at Kodaikanal, around 430km from here. The plant was shut down in 2011 after Greenpeace activists found mercury waste in the...

-The Indian Express Hyderabad/ Bhubaneshwar: In neighbouring Telangana, where the government has not declared any ex-gratia, 486 deaths have been reported from 10 districts where temperatures have been consistently high. Of the 1,636 “heat wave” deaths reported between May 15 and May 30 in Andhra Pradesh, only a little over one-third have so far been certified to have been caused by heat. The number of deaths being reported to mandal officers, Andhra Disaster...