-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government is set to test a new strategy to build highways, using geofoam - or giant lightweight polystyrene blocks - in a bid to slash construction time and costs and increase the life span of roads by reducing the risk of rain-triggered damage. Officials said the Union ministry of road transport and highways had cleared a proposal to use Thermocol, a popular geofoam brand, as the filler...

-Hindustan Times India’s back-to-back drought is likely to end in winter with the weather department predicting higher-than-normal rainfall between October and December in the southern part of the country and normal rains in the rest, boosting prospects of the winter harvest. The rabi, or winter-sown, season is vital since it accounts for nearly half the country’s total food output. The forecast eases worries about water shortages in the nation’s 89 nationally important...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The summer monsoon weakened across large swathes of India in the past century, scientists said today, linking the reductions in rainfall to hitherto-unobserved trends that they say portend a dangerous drying of the Indian subcontinent. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said they had identified a significant weakening trend in summer rainfall between 1901 and 1912 over central and northern India, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basins and...

-The Indian Express Hyderabad/ Bhubaneshwar: In neighbouring Telangana, where the government has not declared any ex-gratia, 486 deaths have been reported from 10 districts where temperatures have been consistently high. Of the 1,636 “heat wave” deaths reported between May 15 and May 30 in Andhra Pradesh, only a little over one-third have so far been certified to have been caused by heat. The number of deaths being reported to mandal officers, Andhra Disaster...

-The Times of India The scorching summer continued to claim lives in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with as many as 165 more deaths reported on Sunday, even as the soaring mercury broke records in other parts of India. The sunstroke toll in the two states has now touched 500. And, there is likely to be no early respite from the killer heat as India Meteorological Department extended the severe heat wave warning...