-Firstpost.com The sensitivity of agricultural productivity to climate depends strongly on crop selection. India is a vast country with disparate climate variability and change signals from north-to-south and east-to-west. The mix of field crops like rice, wheat, jowar, corn and soybean, as well as speciality products like vegetables, flowers, nuts, fruits, etc, are also vastly different across the subcontinent. To understand the climate sensitivity of agriculture across such complex terrain that has...

-The Hindu The merger of the NSSO into the Central Statistics Office is a cause for concern The announcement that the government has decided to merge the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) into and under the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has caused both surprise and concern. What exactly the ‘merger’ MEAns remains unclear. Recent attempts to question the veracity of National Sample Survey (NSS) data and the way the issue has been...

-Hindustan Times It is also important to remember that both these laws were the product of sustained, grassroots-level social movements. Consequently, perhaps the surest remedy against possible future dilution may lie not in judicial challenges (although that remains important), but in popular mobilisation. With the 2019 general election yielding a decisive mandate for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), attention will soon turn to the new government’s legislative agenda. As the government is...

-The Telegraph Just about half of patients aware, the study A nationwide study has found that only about half the diabetes patients in India are aware of their condition, 40 per cent are under treatment and about a quarter have their blood sugar levels under control. The study by the Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, and collaborating institutions has suggested that only 52 per cent of patients aged between 15 and...

-The Telegraph What is most worrying is that some of the top causes of these deaths are preventable infectious diseases A progress report does not always bring cheer. A Lancet study showed that death of children under five in India went down from 2.5 million in the year 2000 to 1.2 million in 2015. Unfortunately, this still MEAnt that India had the highest child mortality rate in the world in 2015. The...