-NDTV Chennai:  As Chennai struggles to find its footing after the massive floods that has killed over 100 people, experts say it was a man-made disaster that was waiting to strike the city.   Over the years, water bodies across the city have been filled up and built upon, often by politicians with interests in the real estate business, say environmentalists. The result:  During incessant rains, water overflows. In 2005 a similar deluge...

-The Times of India Yet another deluge, coming close on the heels of the wettest November Chennai has seen in over a century, is something the city just could not cope with. Heavy rains on November 16 had exposed the appalling state of the civic infrastructure that was totally unprepared to handle the floods. Clogged and overflowing drains, inundated housing colonies, rotting garbage, electrocutions and roads caving in at many places...

-The Indian Express Government cannot afford to wait any longer to address the building agricultural distress. The government and the political class seem oblivious to a deepening farm crisis, resulting from back-to-back monsoon failures and falling crop prices. One indicator of the growing agrarian distress is farmer suicides, no longer a phenomenon confined to Vidarbha or Telangana. The current year has seen farmers even in states like Karnataka, Odisha and Madhya...

-The Indian Express Delhi lost the window of opportunity to avoid an outbreak because of a governance deficit; first because the state was in election mode and then because of the AAP’s internal squabbles. The past few weeks have witnessed substantial media coverage on the dengue outbreak in Delhi. Heartrending stories of clearly avoidable deaths gave the crisis a human face. Focusing on Delhi, most sought to expose the lack of...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Hundreds of schools in Delhi may be working out of unsafe buildings, endangering the lives of their students, since a structural stability certificate — needed for these institutions to remain functional — comes for as little as Rs 3,000, no questions asked. On hearing that engineers and architects at Tis Hazari court complex were “selling” these certificates, HT decided to test the theory — and found it to...