-The Indian Express Out of the 62 pesticide poisoning deaths reported in Maharashtra last year, 21 were in Yavatmal district alone, which also registered over 800 hospitalisation cases. Nagpur: Maharashtra has banned the sale of five moderately-to-extremely toxic insecticides and cancelled the licences of six companies for the current kharif season, as part of steps to prevent the recurrence of last year’s pesticide inhalation accidents that caused the deaths of 62 farmers...

-The Hindu The court-ordered clean-up in the textile town has managed to mitigate ill-effects of industrial pollution to a large extent. A similar remediation effort, involving the government and stakeholders, is needed in other parts of Tamil Nadu, where groundwater has been so contaminated that farming is not possible anymore On a sunny June morning, two men are spotted fishing close to the Orathupalayam dam in Erode district. A rather ordinary act in...

-The Hindu The ban comes into effect from January 1, 2019 Chennai: The State government on Tuesday announced a ban on manufacture, sales, storage and usage of disposable plastic across State with effective from January 1, 2019. Making a suo motu statement in the Assembly here, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami said that the announcement was based on the recommendations of an expert panel constituted by former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa in this regard. However,...

-The Hindu It will decide on water sharing. New Delhi: Three days after the Karnataka Assembly election results and three months after the Supreme Court’s order, the Union government on Friday issued a notification for the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA). The authority will decide the sharing of the river water among the States of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry. MPs of both the AIADMK and the...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...