Forest fires are not just confined to countries like the United States of America (California, 2020), Brazil (Amazon forest, 2019-2020) or Australia (2019-20); they happen every year across many states in India too. Media reports suggest that forest fires have taken place in the recent months in Odisha's Simlipal National Park, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, among other states. Forest fires have also been reported this year in Nagaland-Manipur border (Dzukou...

-Down to Earth Sharad Chandra, director, flood forecast monitoring division, Central Water Commission, spoke to DTE on increasing instances of urban flooding   Urban flooding is increasingly becoming a common occurrence in India, the latest victim being Hyderabad. The city received unusually heavy rainfall October 13-14, 2020, due to a deep depression that developed in the Bay of Bengal. Heavy damage to property, roads and human lives were reported. Experts have argued that...

-Economic and Political Weekly Integrated and long-term solutions are needed to mitigate the adverse impacts of floods. With the early onset of the monsoon, heavy rainfall and concomitant flooding have caused widespread destruction and loss of lives, livestock and crops in many parts of the country. Although floods occur annually, this time around, the floods occurring at the time of the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country had slowed...

Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...

-The Hindu Forecasting model from IITM, Pune, says heat waves likely to be three or four times higher India’s first ever national forecast on the impact of global warming on the subcontinent in the coming century, expects Annual rainfall to increase, along with more severe cyclones and — paradoxically — more droughts. These projections, based on a climate forecasting model developed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, will be part...