DownToEarth The Aral Sea, the world’s fourth-largest lake until the early 1960s, dried up after that decade in Soviet Central Asia and became a byword for environmental disaster later, almost on the lines of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Now, a new study has found that the desert which emerged due to the drying up of the lake, has made Central Asia a much dustier place. Not only is the dust more hazardous...

KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

-The Telegraph Slushy water is eroding underground rock, accelerating the subsidence in parts of the town, geologist Piyoosh Rautela tells The Telegraph New Delhi: Piyoosh Rautela, a professional geologist, has scrambled over the past week to manage a crisis in Joshimath he had warned about 12 years ago — a spike in the central Himalayan town’s sinking rate triggered by the sudden release of underground water. The water discharge from a burst aquifer...

Jharkhand's government schools have a massive teacher shortage, a survey by Gyan Vigyan Samiti Jharkhand has found. The survey was conducted in 138 primary and upper primary schools between September and October 2022 to assess their condition after the Covid-19 pandemic. Jharkhand's school system was shut for two years, among the longest in the world. Teachers told the surveyors they felt that most students had forgotten how to read and...

-India Spend India's transition to sustainable farming has to be calibrated and orchestrated well, drawing lessons from the successes of India's Green Revolution and the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, says sustainable farming expert P.S. Vijayshankar Bengaluru: The production-centric intensive agriculture brought about by India's Green Revolution in the 1960s, using high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and high levels of groundwater utilisation, helped India achieve food self-sufficiency by the 1970s, but has created a...