-Hindustan Times New Delhi: About half of Delhi would have flattened out had the epicentre of Saturday's morning earthquake been in or near the national capital. DK Paul, professor emeritus at IIT Roorkee's earthquake engineering department and part of the team that carried out a microzonation study of the capital in 2007, told HT that devastation in Delhi would be many times more not only on account of its high seismicity (it...

-The Indian Express As the toll of human misery and suicide mounts, official estimates of farm losses due to unseasonal rains and hailstorms in March remain controversial, with hasty downward revision. Since these estimates are largely notional, without validation from field visits, such revision smacks of deliberate fiddling. On March 24, the agriculture ministry reported that crops on 18 million hectares — about 30 per cent of the rabi crops —...

-New York Times Blog The earth beneath Lakshmi Karre’s sparse cotton crop is hard and dry. Dressed in a flowery orange sari, she squats in the large gap between two plants and tugs at some brittle leaves, turned speckled brown by a fungal disease known as cotton rust. “When I was young we used to get 100 cotton bolls per plant,” she says. “There was no gap between the plants. Now they...

-The Hindu India cannot continue with a pattern of industry that yields so few jobs but has such a large ecological footprint. Neither can it be excited by the urban nightmares that its cities are today. The land law debate must be the occasion to talk about these key national agendas The current debate on the land law is important because it affords us a chance to reflect more deeply on the...

-IPS News BELLARY, India: HuligeAmma, a Dalit woman in her mid-forties, bends over a sewing machine, carefully running the needle over the hem of a shirt. Sitting nearby is Roopa, her 22-year-old daughter, who reads an amusing message on her cell phone and laughs heartily. The pair leads a simple yet contented life – they subsist on half a dollar a day, stitch their own clothes and participate in schemes to educate...