How clean are our rivers? Latest Data indicates a negative trend. A report by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), which was released in September this year, reveals that in total there were 45 river stretches across the country in 2016-17, where water quality is found to be the worst. In 2014-15, however, the total number of such river stretches was just 34. Technically speaking, the value of biochemical oxygen demand...
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Manual scavenger count rises, despite ban -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph The number, according to the figures reported by the states in 2015, was around 13,770. The latest survey found 20,596 manual scavengers in 2018 New Delhi: Manual scavenging has been banned since 1993 but there has been little impact on the ground. The latest Data from a survey conducted by the National Safai Karamcharis Finance & Development Corporation this year on manual scavengers has found their number has risen by over...
More »Indian agriculture's problem of scale
-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...
More »In Several UP Villages, Toilets Exist Only on Paper -Kabir Agarwal
-TheWire.in The government claims 99% of Uttar Pradesh is open defecation free, but the ground reality shows this assertion is far from the truth. Lucknow/ Barabanki/ Meerut/ Shamli: Hetampur is a small village of about 1,200 people in central Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district, located 50 kilometres from the state capital Lucknow. The village has been declared open defecation free (ODF) under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin). Urmila is a resident of the...
More »How wet is the ground after rain? for first time, India gets soil moisture map -Sowmiya Ashok
-The Indian Express This forecast, following a joint exercise by IIT Gandhinagar and the India Meteorological Department (IMD), for the first time, provides a country-wide soil moisture forecast at seven and 30-day lead times. New Delhi: With the rabi season around the corner, a countrywide forecast prepared at the end of the monsoon season suggests deficit soil moisture conditions are likely in Gujarat, Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and southern Andhra Pradesh. This forecast,...
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