-PTI New Delhi: As pollution levels worsened in Delhi, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today said schools in the city will remain closed till Wednesday and announced a raft of “emergency” measures to deal with the situation including ban on construction and demolition activities for the next five days and temporary closure of the Badarpur Power Plant. Emerging from an emergency cabinet meet, Kejriwal said the government will discuss with the Centre the...

-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-India Water Portal How paddy grew in popularity in Punjab and continues to steal the show, thanks to lack of alternatives for farmers. Take the roads of Punjab during the monsoon and you will find most fields turned into pools of water. It’s mainly the water pulled out from the underground vault to support the kharif crop of paddy. Neither a native plant nor suited to the agro-climatic region, paddy has...

-The Indian Express As efforts are made to make India open defecation free by 2019, the biggest stumbling block is not the lack of enough toilets, but the difficulty in convincing people to start using them. New Delhi: Despite freshly-constructed functioning toilets in their homes, a group of old men in a village in Daniyawan block, about 30 km southeast of Patna city, continued to go out in the fields to defecate....

-The Hindu Business Line The Narendra Modi government has shown intent in pushing for rural electrification, but the devil lies in the detail, write Richa Mishra and Debabrata Das Soon after taking over at the helm of the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was at a function in Solapur, Maharashtra. Sharing one of his visions, Modi said, “Many elections have been fought in our country on this issue and the issue is...