-Newsclick.in The pandemic has heightened an already simmering economic crisis – and the worst is still to come. The number of employed persons in India plummeted from about 40 crore in January to 39 crore in April 2021. That’s a loss of one crore employed persons, one of the steepest falls ever in four months, barring the brutal devastation caused by last year’s complete countrywide lockdown in April-May 2020. This emerges from...

-TheCitizen.in ‘The whole process is faceless’ As the managing director of CropData Sachin Suri explained to Microsoft’s news desk last year, the abstract looking artwork behind him is not a painting. “This is actually a spectral analysis satellite image of farms. Each tiny spot, or a geo-spatial tile, is an actual field in Punjab and the different colors denote the stress levels in individual farms.” That frame is the crux of what CropData,...

-TheThirdPole.net Study finds populations of some higher-altitude districts in Himalayan state have already dropped. Climate change in Uttarakhand will increasingly force people to abandon farming at high altitudes and move to the plains over the next 30 years. A new study on the state in the middle of the Himalayan range by the Germany-based Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi has...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-TheThirdPole.net Farmers and consumers are opting to grow coconut trees despite the national push for domestic palm oil production Jeyalakshmi Palaniappan, 55, planted one-and-a-half acres of oil palm in a village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But she found cultivating them financially unviable and, nine years later, she uprooted them. Now, she grows coconut trees on another piece of land in the same village, and these are bringing her...