-Scroll.in A severe shortage of government-distributed pesticides aggravated the crop loss from attacks by brown planthoppers. A twin calamity has struck farmers in Odisha in recent weeks. A moderate to severe drought has affected paddy crops on more than 3.1 lakh hectares of land in over 6,000 villages across 15 districts. In addition, an attack by brown planthoppers – insects that feed on rice plants – has destroyed paddy fields on...

-The Hindu If we oppose every solution to the problem of air pollution, how will we ever breathe clean air, asks the environmentalist Environmentalist Sunita Narain has been fighting for clean air for decades. The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, with which she has been associated and now serves as director general, led the shift to compressed natural gas in Delhi, to reduce air pollution. Ms. Narain is on the statutory...

-The Times of India blog With the approaching Winter the air quality in many Indian cities, especially in Delhi, becomes a public health hazard. Something so fundamental as breathing easy can no longer be taken for granted. It’s a wake-up call worthy of a civic revolution. For decades now those who could afford it (very much including this writer), have seceded from public services. The Indian elite send their children to expensive...

-The Indian Express Delhi has become world’s air pollution outcaste. Its decision-makers haven’t understood the consequences. The first thing that the Central and Delhi governments should own up to regarding the air pollution crisis is that everyone was forewarned and cannot pretend to be taken unawares. This “Winter of our discontent” is the season when, as temperatures dip, pollutants hover around the surface of the city and do not waft upwards. Things...

-Firstpost.com Delhiites are cursed by geography to be prone to a meteorological phenomenon called inversion where warm air rests above the colder air closer to the ground, preventing it from mixing upwards thereby trapping all that we put into it – almost like a lid Delhi’s pollution episodes at this time of the year have become an annual affair - the latest one has the Chief Minister comparing Delhi to a gas...