-Hindustan Times If you thought climate change was only about melting glaciers and sinking islands, you have underestimated it. A report by C40, a global network of 82 megacities--including Delhi--committed to fighting climate change, says that at least 70% of these urban centres are already affected by climate change. Not all of them are coast or hill towns. As population is increasing in these megacities, rising pollution, growing congestion and mounting waste...

-Livemint.com Telangana 9th state to declare drought, adding to the agrarian crisis and posing a threat to the rural economy New Delhi: Telangana has declared a drought in parts of the state, becoming the ninth state this year to do so, highlighting the agrarian crisis that could cause a likely fall in the production of rain-fed crops such as pulses, oilseeds and cotton, and result in a further slowing of the...

-The Hindu What happened at Shishubhawan is symptomatic of how deep the rot is in India's crumbling public health infrastructure. It has been two months since news and reports of the deaths of 40 infants at Shishubhawan, the largest paediatric care centre in eastern India, broke. The facility is for critically-ill children from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. By the end of September, 56 deaths were reported in a span on 12 days. Even...

-Down to Earth From providing agricultural information for specific countries to identifying trends in the sector, censuses serve a variety of purpose In the backdrop of a round of country-driven agricultural censuses which will begin in 2016 to gather information and statistics on the global agriculture sector, senior FAO statiscian Jairo Castano discusses with Down To Earth the importance of the exercise. * How helpful are agricultural censuses in gathering information and statistics...

-Economic and Political Weekly The platform known as the JAM Trinity (an acronym for Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers) may enable a shift from the current Public Distribution System, based on price subsidies, to the direct transfer of benefits. However, it is incorrect to argue that JAM technologies will necessarily lead to the demise of the PDS. State-level experiences of computerisation, recounted here, reveal that the same technologies can...