How many happy seeder machines are currently available in Haryana and Punjab? Against the backdrop of a recent advisory issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare in response to the dense smog that engulfed the entire NCR since October this year, the above question seems pertinent. The happy seeder machine is considered as a magic bullet  to curb the menace of stubble burning during the wheat-paddy cropping cycle,...

-PTI New Delhi: As Delhi and its neighbours spar over stubble burning, a Centre-run monitoring agency has identified a West Asian dust storm as the chief trigger behind the recent smog episode in the region. On November 8, the contribution of the dust storm was 40 per cent, eclipsing the role of emissions from stubble burning, which stood at 25 per cent, the Pune-based System of Air Quality And Weather Forecasting And...

-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...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...

-The Hindu Studies on the Swachh Bharat Mission don’t confirm the government’s claims On October 2, 2017, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) completed its third year. Over Rs. 60,000 crore has been spent on the programme, but despite its scope and importance, there is very little objective evidence about its performance So far the numbers that have been widely cited by the government are from its own administrative data and the Swachh Survekshan...