-India Water Portal The time for quick fixes is over; a comprehensive policy overhaul is urgently needed to impede the juggernaut of Punjab's groundwater depletion. Punjab, a small state in northwest India, derives its name from the Persian words panj (five) and āb (water), meaning the "land of five rivers". Ironically, this state is now regularly in the news for its rapidly depleting groundwater levels. The most recent government report on Punjab's...
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Hari Sharma, agricultural scientist formerly associated with the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), interviewed by Kunal Shankar (TheWire.in)
-TheWire.in In an interview for The Wire, the former ICRISAT scientist says the damage could have been contained if the government had acted promptly to warnings. The desert locust is a deadly agricultural pest that has been on a feeding spree across North Africa, West Asia and South Asia. Lore and mentions of locust swarms exist in the Mahabharata, the Bible and the Quran. But it has been largely absent from the...
More »UN body warns of another invasion of locusts in July
-Hindustan Times In its situation update on Thursday, FAO said early migration of spring-bred locust swarms from southwest Pakistan to Rajasthan occurred in May before the monsoon, and some swarms travelled to northern states for the first time since 1962. Jodhpur/ Jaipur/ Bhopal: India might face another attack of crop-munching desert locusts in July, the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO) has warned amid an ongoing outbreak that has prompted...
More »14 quakes in 2 months may not lead to a big one in NCR -Jayashree Nandi
-Hindustan Times Still, monitoring them is key to being prepared , they add. Scientists at the National Centre for Seismology (NCS) underlined that earthquakes cannot be forecast and the only thing to do is to be aware of the activities in vulnerable pockets such as the Delhi region. Wednesday night’s minor tremor in Noida was the fourteenth (14th) to hit Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) over the past two months,...
More »Locust invasions in a number of Indian states have arisen out of climate change induced extreme rainfalls in desert areas
In the midst of COVID-19 lockdown, desert locust swarms have been seen in parts of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh in the second half of May 2020. The recent attacks by desert locust swarms have caused massive crop damage, depletion in the stock of cattle fodder and destruction of green vegetation in these states. As on 25th May, 2020, over half of Rajasthan’s 33 districts were...
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