-Hindustan Times Dehradun: Lack of watershed harvesting and monsoon-based farming is the key reason why crop intensity of Uttarakhand is Poorer than neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, experts say. The crop intensity is the number of times a crop is planted in an agricultural area. Union ministry of agriculture and farmers’ welfare data, states that Himachal Pradesh reported a 3,100 hectare difference in the crop intensity index between 2012-13 and 2013-2014 while Uttarakhand reported a...

-The Hindu If we oppose every solution to the problem of air pollution, how will we ever breathe clean air, asks the environmentalist Environmentalist Sunita Narain has been fighting for clean air for decades. The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, with which she has been associated and now serves as director general, led the shift to compressed natural gas in Delhi, to reduce air pollution. Ms. Narain is on the statutory...

-Deccan Chronicle Maintaining green cover (not just trees, but also grass and small plants) is a big challenge in Delhi due to the shortage of water. With the quality of Delhi’s air has again reached critical levels with severe pollution, alarm bells have gone off, and the Delhi government announced it would bring back the “odd-even” scheme, that seems to be turning into an annual ritual. (The plan has been temporarily kept...

-The Hindu We need to revisit the credit policy with a focus on the outreach of banks and financial inclusion Since Independence, one of the primary objectives of India’s agricultural policy has been to improve farmers’ access to institutional credit and reduce their dependence on informal credit. As informal sources of credit are mostly usurious, the government has improved the flow of adequate credit through the nationalisation of commercial banks, and the...

-Hindustan Times Asians have a 2–4-times higher risk of type 2 diabetes than white Europeans. With a prediabetes prevalence of 10.3% among adults, people with diabetes in India are likely to more than double in the next decade from the current 70 million, a study by the country’s apex research organisation has estimated. The prevalence of prediabetes — also known as “impaired glucose tolerance” and a precursor to diabetes — is 1.4 times...