-The Hindu India must use green technologies to boost growth and become a climate leader The UN’s Emissions Gap Report comes as a sharp warning to countries preparing to meet in Madrid in December, under the aegis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, that every year of inaction is jeopardising the main goal of the Paris Agreement: to keep the rise in global temperature over pre-industrial times well below 2°C,...

-The Hindu Business Line The proposals relating to registration of seed varieties and powers granted to the government to fix prices in some situations need a relook Seed is the primary input of a productive agriculture set-up. No one can deny the fact that the seed industry has been at the centre of the significant advances made in agriculture in the last four decades and will continue to do in the years...

-The Indian Express At current rates of depletion, Punjab’s entire subsurface water resource could be exhausted in a little over two decades. Jalandhar: As the discussion around Punjab’s massive groundwater crisis becomes more urgent, there is an increasingly stronger accent on diversification of crops, and a move away from water-guzzling paddy. At a meeting over the weekend, Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, decided to strengthen maize — the most important alternative to...

-The Hindu Amnesty’s India head Aakar Patel alleges that FTs were often dismissive, used derogatory language, controlled their own procedures and applied them in arbitrary ways. Guwahati: Amnesty International India said on Wednesday that the Supreme Court and the Gauhati High Court had enabled the Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs) to create a statelessness crisis in Assam. The global rights body made this observation in a briefing, ‘Designed to Exclude’, as it called for a...

-The Indian Express Viable solutions to PDS portability are being ignored in the push for Aadhaar. Migrants’ woes are often invoked in making a case for portability of benefits in the public distribution system (PDS). Most recently, an ARTicle (‘A hundred small steps’, IE, September 26) did just that. However, in many cases of short-term seasonal migration (a dominant form in India), only one or two of the household members migrate,...