-PTI/ Newsclick.in The economist said the word 'freebies' indicates the class position of those who use it. New Delhi: Economist Jayati Ghosh said that 'basic needs' like nutrition, healthcare, housing and education, which the government should provide for its citizens, are not freebies, while asserting that the poor are more entitled to receive their basic needs. Ghosh noted that the word 'freebies' indicates the class position of those who use it. "India has one...

-The Telegraph Lessons to take away from the two recent calamities in NorthEast It is never easy to rationalise tragedy. The two witnessed recently in the Northeast are no exceptions. One, the Assam floods in which the state’s two major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Barak, and their tributaries wreaked havoc, killing nearly 200 people and, at one point, putting close to 4.5 million people in danger of starvation and disease. Two,...

The transport sector is important for the smooth functioning of an economy. The supply chains for various products and by-products (both domestically as well as internationally) can work efficiently only if the transportation of raw materials and inputs, and final goods and commodities takes place without disruption.   Due to economic growth, India’s annual CO2 (i.e., carbon dioxide) emission has expanded from 1.19 billion tonnes in 2005 to 2.44 billion tonnes...

-The Telegraph The scientist, Madhav Gadgil, turns 80 this month I come from a family of scientists, but I shied away from studying science myself. Yet, in a happy irony, it turned out that the most important intellectual collaboration of my life was with a scientist, Madhav Gadgil, whose eightieth birthday falls later this month. Born in Pune, Gadgil studied in Bombay, and at Harvard, where he took a PhD in ecology and...

-Press release by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) dated 18 May 2022 Geneva, 18 May 2022 (WMO): Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the ATMosphere, with harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development and...