Crowdfunding - Fund At Your Own Risk

Crowdfunding has emerged as a popular option in India to help people avail expensive medical treatments. But in the absence of regulation, donors are vulnerable to fraudulent campaigns

Millet might

Odisha's mission to bring millets back to its fields and plates can succeed with greater marketing support and promotion beyond tribal areas

Invisibilisation of Dalit scholars

A PERSON READING CASTE AND PARTITION IN BENGAL: THE STORY OF DALIT REFUGEES, 1946-1961 WOULD THINK THAT DALITS HAVE NEVER DONE A CASTE ANALYSIS OF PARTITION, WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE

OZONE ON FIRE

Frequent, widespread forest fires in a warming world are the new threats to the ozone layer

Moderna strikes with a new lawsuit

Moderna is trying to be gatekeeper for the mRNA platform for future drug development, raising monopolistic fears

PERILS IN A DEFINITION

The country's Supreme Court is tasked with deciding whether political parties should be restricted from promising freebies in election campaigns and manifestos. But the debate is not so simple

Planetary summer

Prolonged droughts and heat waves are wreaking havoc across continents. Europe may have reached the point of no return

Cost of credit

Information accessed by Down To Earth under the Right To Information Act belies the government's claim that banks give farm loans without any service charge or mortgaging farmer's land

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

The plastic problem needs to be reframed. The issue is not just how plastic waste is disposed of, but also how the material enters the supply chain and for whose benefit. India cannot end plastic pollution until it holds the petrochemical behemoths and the plastic industry accountable for manufacturing the menace

A Covid-19 Encore With Monkeypox

A familiar pattern is emerging in the battle against monkeypox with the US and Europe grabbing scarce vaccine supplies

Freedom fuel

Pune entrepreneur experiments with cooking devices powered by solar and biomass to beat rising LPG prices

All zeros and ones

The ability to capture, store and model data is fuelling the technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution, which many believe will lead to a future owned by corporations

A question of sales

Natural farming practices have drastically reduced input costs, but Himachal Pradesh's farmers still lack market access

Capital owners

PROPERTIES OF RENT IS ABOUT THE TENSION BETWEEN RAPIDLY CHANGING ECONOMIC REALITIES AND THE PARALLEL ATTEMPTS BY COMMUNITIES TO HOLD ON TO KINSHIP ASSOCIATIONS, AS WELL AS TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF RESPECT AND HONOUR

RESTRICTED IN GIR

Despite ample scientific evidence and a Supreme Court order to translocate lions from Gir forest of Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh's Kuno National Park, the shift to establish a second wild population has not happened

Churn under sea

SEAFLOOR SPREADING, CAUSED BY AN UPWELLING OF MAGMA, HAS LED TO EPISODES OF GLOBAL WARMING IN THE GEOLOGIC PAST. THE SPREAD RATE HAS SLOWED DOWN IN LAST 19 MILLION YEARS, BUT COULD GATHER MOMENTUM

Model shift

Farmers in Zimbabwe are shifting from rain-fed to irrigation-based agriculture to beat erratic rains in a rapidly changing climate

Does Rajasthan's Wage Employment Scheme Tick All The Boxes?

Rajasthan's attempt to provide income security to urban poor shows challenges of designing a wage guarantee scheme for towns and cities

Dry monsoon for east, northeast

EAST AND northeast India may continue to see a deficit of rainfall in August and September this monsoon season, as per the recent analysis by the India Meteorlogical Department (IMD). Most parts of the regions have been receiving below normal rainfall since June. July rainfall, 44.7 per cent less than normal, was the lowest in 122 years, says IMD.

Perfect decomposition

A Goa-based startup offers a homegrown biodegradable polymer as an alternative to single-use wrappers

PURPLE POWER

Packed with nutrients, the deep-coloured jamun gives an excellent health boost during the monsoon while ensuring year-round wellness

Organic takeover

A federation of farmer-producer organisations taps into the growing organic market to help members raise incomes

Africa To Pay For Europe's Energy Crisis

AT THE latest meeting of the Group of 7 (G7) countries, host Germany and Italy watered down a pledge to end financing for overseas gas projects. The pledge was made at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change last year, and at the meet in June, new loopholes were introduced for temporary financing so countries can tide over the energy crisis due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

Not an easy fix

Global warming could be depleting forests and grasslands of a key macronutrient, nitrogen. This will have far-reaching consequences on the growth and survival of the animal world

Fuelling problems

With LPG price crossing the ₹1,000-mark, the poor are forced to return to unclean cooking fuels

Illusive oilseed

Without the Centre's push, niger seed might vanish from the tribal food plate in near future

Sequence for a just future

Without a robust regulatory framework, digital genomic data will not allow benefits from biological resources to reach communities

Acquired shortage

India's HIV drug shortage is real and could have been averted

Imposed choice

Rise in hysterectomies among younger women and at private hospitals signals imminent public health crisis

TAKING OWNERSHIP

There is a surge in demand by forest communities to not only access the resources of their habitat, but also to establish their ownership over forests. They are doing so by wielding a previously underused provision of the Forest Rights Act. The forest department, however, is reluctant to let go of its control. SHUCHITA JHA and ZUMBISH travel across Odisha and Chhattisgarh to understand how communities have gained through this law and the mechanisms they are setting up to ensure sustainable use of forest resources PARTY