-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...

-The Telegraph How did unorganized labour become invisible? Thanks to a humongous oversight on the part of the government, India’s unorganized labour has suddenly become a vivid, long-running story. Photographers walk with families undertaking unimaginable journeys. Reporters tail them in SUVs. Their faces and daily tragedies have dominated newspaper headlines and television news for two months running, something nobody would have ever thought possible. Since when did hyperventilating news channels focus on...

-ThePrint.in Under the Modi government, the MGNREGS has suddenly become both an indicator of rural stagnation as well as the proposed solution to it. Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar had told the Lok Sabha in July this year that the Narendra Modi government was “not in favour of continuing with” the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for long.  While MGNREGS’ target group is the rural poor, the Modi government’s...

-Business Standard Aiming for unachievable growth rates would compound past errors. The economy has to lower its sights, and do some hard thinking about how to come out of the present hole, writes T N Ninan There is a general sense that the economic growth problem came upon us suddenly in the last few months. In some ways, it did — for example, through the continuing fallout of the collapse 11 months...

-The Hindu Decreasing monsoon rainfall is associated with natural changes in the subtropical Pacific Ocean Northeast India, one of the wettest places on the Earth has been experiencing rapid drying, especially in the last 30 years. Some places which used to get as high as 3,000 mm of rain during the monsoon season have seen a drop of about 25-30%. A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and...