On September 18, Bimola Rai’s world was reduced to rubble. A student of Class III in Bop village in Chungthang block of North District in Sikkim, a Himalayan border state, she was left traumatized when a devastating earthquake of 6.9 magnitude on the Richter scale, flattened her home and school building, located at an altitude of 5,500 feet. Today, Bimola joins 26 other children of her village to walk the four...

West Bengal: An agrarian crisis looms over the State as farmers commit suicide in spite of a bumper crop. THE topic of suicide figured repeatedly in Safar Molla's conversations with his neighbours a few days before his death. The 18-year-old marginal farmer from Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district's Bhatar block talked about it quite casually, in fact even jocularly. Everybody in the village knew he was up to his neck in...

Five women — all illegal miners — were buried alive when the roof of a 15ft deep coal pit collapsed on them near Chandrapura junction, 35km from Bokaro steel city, this noon. Two others were injured in the incident. That the mishap took place at Jhungurghuttu, which is a stone’s throw from a bustling railway station and barely 400 metres from the Chandrapura police station, is a clear indication that illegal...

Observed changes in rainfall patterns and increased temperatures, particularly in the North-Eastern region, are the major projections on which Indian agriculture scientists are pegging their “mitigation and adaptation” plans in the farm sector in the absence of definitive long-term and area-specific data on climate change. Acknowledging that in India the “climate system is extremely complex and poorly understood in terms of extent, timing and impact”, Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR)...

-The Indian Express   SC is right that natural resources are held in public trust, but its comments on allocation are simplistic In its ruling in the 2G spectrum allocation case, the Supreme Court said that auctions were the best route for allocation of finite natural resources. “While transferring or alienating the natural resources, the State is duty bound to adopt the method of auction by giving wide publicity so that all eligible...