-Scroll.in The trend is also linked to recent locust outbreaks, as large quantities of vegetation provide food for locust swarms. Ravindranath lives in the heart of the Thar desert in India. He and his family are agropastoralists – people who grow crops and rear livestock – in the village of Kalu in Bikaner district, Rajasthan. But the dry grasslands that people like Ravindranath have depended on for centuries for pasture are slowly being...

-The Indian Express Efforts to address child marriage in India should be in consonance with the socio-economic realities that demand investment in education, welfare, and opportunities for women. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emphasis in his Independence Day speech on raising the legal age of marriage for women to 21 years is any indicator of the path the task force set up for this purpose is likely to tread, it needs to...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...

-The Indian Express Prashant Bhushan writes: I am shocked that the court holds me guilty of “malicious, scurrilous, calculated attack” on the institution of administration of justice. I am dismayed that the Court has arrived at this conclusion without providing any evidence of my motives to launch such an attack. I have gone through the judgment of this Hon’ble Court. I am pained that I have been held guilty of committing contempt...

-The Hindu Business Line Rains may return to South by early September The Central Water Commission (CWC) has said that major rivers flowed in severe flood situation on Saturday at 33 stations across Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Telangana and one each in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and West Bengal on account of enhanced monsoon conditions generated by successive low-pressure areas from the Bay of Bengal. The South Peninsula has not witnessed...