Lakshmi Surendran

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

All democrats must stand in solidarity with @mahuamoitra in her travails. If the price of her convictions is that a mob is baying for her, it is the duty of the government to provide her security, not to ask her to vacate government accommodation! Such elementary considerations should not need to spelled out in a democracy, least of all on the day that marks the culmination of our freedom struggle. #StandWithMahua #IndependenceDay

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

When India accidentally wiped out its vultures, half a million people died in five years.

The bird doing zoomies in this video runs the most extreme digestive system in the animal kingdom. Vulture stomach acid sits near pH 1, strong enough to destroy anthrax, rabies, and botulism in the carcasses they eat. A flock strips a cow to bone in about 45 minutes.

India had 50 million of them. Free sanitation at national scale, in a country where religious custom means most cattle die natural deaths and every dead cow becomes a carcass someone has to deal with.

Then the patent on diclofenac expired in 1994. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. Trace amounts left in a carcass cause kidney failure in vultures. Within a decade, 50 million birds fell to a few thousand. The fastest collapse of any bird species since the passenger pigeon.

The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs took the vultures' place and brought rabies with them. Rotting remains leached into waterways. In districts where vultures once thrived, human death rates rose more than 4 percent. Economists at Chicago and Warwick put the toll at 100,000 extra deaths a year and $69 billion in annual damages.

So yes, the goofy bird sprinting down the walkway is adorable. It's also a disease firewall that evolution spent millions of years building and one generic painkiller nearly erased in ten.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated life advice: Just be easy to work with. Show up on time. Do what you said you'd do. Bring solutions, not problems. Never create drama. Be responsive. Be emotionally consistent. Be kind. People will always want to support someone who just makes their life easier.

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

#Alert🚨

Two hours ago, the Pondicherry Police showed up at my family’s home and subjected them to all kinds of questioning. Why this harassment, @PuducheryPolice? Who ordered this and for what purpose? Is this the legal procedure? Why is the BJP government in Pondicherry intimidating my family? This is not the character of the Pondy government. This is being done at the behest of the Union government!

If the intention is to intimidate me into silence, it will not work. This will not cower me down. It only strengthens our resolve to build a better system, one where the police uphold the law instead of acting like goondas!

@Cockroachisback

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | Delhi | Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) Founder Abhijeet Dipke says, "We were scheduled to hold our volunteers' meet in Delhi today... We were looking for a hall, but no one would rent us one. Everyone kept saying there was pressure from above... We had managed to secure this hall with great difficulty. We even have the receipt for it. However, the owners received threats this morning. They were told that if they allowed the CJP meeting to take place here, they would be hung upside down... All of this is being done by the BJP... Their actions and words clearly reveal that they are afraid of the country's youth... If they think such petty actions will frighten us, they are sorely mistaken..."

[UPSC & PCS NOTES @UPSC_EDU]

मैं अपने देश की बर्बादी की कहानी लिखूंगा......

दिल जीत लिया भाई ने ❣️❣️❣️

[sanjoy ghose @advsanjoy]

If your eyes don’t tear up listening to this kid then your conscience is dead!

[Pooja Priyamvada @PoojaPriyam_]

Indians by and large are corrupt, we don't mind bending the rules when it suits us, our nationalism and anti-corruption stance only rises when we are at the receiving end of the system.

[Tavishi Jatrele @tavishi_jatrele]

Found @arakucoffee in the streets of Paris and boy I wasn’t disappointed.
Our food game was already goated and now we have speciality coffee from India going global too🥳

[Nidheesh M K @mknid]

Sunny Joseph: if you have never driven up to Iritty it is hard to explain the pull of this man, son of a high-range farmer who they call Sunnychaayan in the Kannur hills, four-time MLA from Peravoor who just took out KK Shailaja of all people (the woman who held the previous record for biggest margin in Kerala).

The KPCC President quietly drafted into the cabinet, the man whose first term as MLA in 2011 is when Iritty finally became a taluk. The average highrange farmer (who is the most affected by man-animal conflicts on the rise in Kerala) has now a voice in the cabinet.

[Darab Farooqui @darab_farooqui]

Look at this map.

Nagpur 45°. Ahmedabad 44°. Prayagraj 43°. Delhi 42°. The entire country is a single dark red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine.

And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet.

The past few days have been hell. So I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers.

What I found was a policy con job that has been running for over two decades.

But before I explain what happened, let's clear some definitions.

A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest.

A forest is a living system. Soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species. It takes decades to become what it is.

You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one.

In 2001, India's forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice. Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said.

It chose the numbers.

The Forest Survey of India quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi.

All forests, on paper.

The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO's definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India's FSI quietly dropped. 

The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards, and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same. India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion. 

It took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning.

The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency. 

I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns. The con is not in what was hidden from experts. It is in what was never explained to the people it was done to.

This is not a technicality. This is the con.

It was a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement.

For ten years after 2001, Congress governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what the numbers meant.

They did nothing.

Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it.

The BJP is different.

When they returned to power in 2014, they came with something Congress never had. An absolute majority, and no coalition compulsions. They did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it.

The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 removed legal protection from "deemed forests." Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real. 

Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated. 

The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally.

CONT++

[Vaishali Mathur @mathur_vaishali]

This needs to be said: We are at Jim Corbett and apparently there is no restriction on loud music till 10:30pm in the night. The roads are full of cars speeding around, at least 30 jeeps plying in one area of the forest, you can see brunt land on both sides and massive tree felling.
So guilty of attending a family wedding here, I cannot say. There’s one I skipped because I didn’t want to be a party to destroying the habitat of animals. But why is Uttarakhand government allowing weddings in a forest reserve? I know my tweet will have zero reaction but
Please tag the concerned agencies when you read this.
@ukcmo @uttrakhand24 @AniUttarakhand

[atul kasbekar @atulkasbekar]

Brilliant from the wonderful @raogajraj
Top actor and a top man

More people should take heed from this lesson

[Nomadic Ex @nomadic_ex]

This is a scene from a government school in Kerala. Kerala is a model for the entire country in providing an excellent education system.
North Indian Sanghis, instead of hating Kerala, look at Kerala and learn. Let your region improve as well.

[Dr.Sivaranjini @dr_sivaranjani]

My sincere and earnest request to you all! Pls do write to the Supreme Court of India! Let there be a strong law to protect future generations aswell! Nothing except WHO recommended formula ORS and water should ever be available in the pharmacies, medical facilities, and schools!
ORS/DRS/QRS etc should not be there on the labels of any drink ever even if it's being sold in the supermarkets/online commerce platforms unless it conforms to the WHO recommended formula ORS.
Tag @indSupremeCourt

[THE SKIN DOCTOR @theskindoctor13]

An example of how serious our country's gatekeepers are about health.

WHO's ORS is a fixed-ratio combination of glucose and electrolytes that's scientifically proven and has saved millions of children's lives from diarrhoea.

Then came the businesses, selling energy or fruit based drinks with similar names like ORSL, Smart ORS, Hydra ORS. These formulas neither had the approved glucose-electrolyte ratio nor any efficacy in treating diarrhoea; in fact, they could worsen it in kids. These products were duly approved by the FSSAI.

Misleading ORS were conveniently stocked right next to genuine ORS sachets in stores, and many unsuspecting parents ended up buying the wrong one.

A group of doctors, led by a pediatrician, raised this issue for 8 years to get fake ORS drinks to stop using ORS in their names. Finally, after almost a decade, FSSAI passed the order to ban such misleading labelling on Oct 14th.

Next, a pharma giant went to the Delhi High Court and got the order stayed to dispose of its current stock on Oct 17th. FSSAI did not oppose their demand or reaffirm the ban in court, nor did they challenge the stay order in the Supreme Court till now. Why? My guess is as good as yours.

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

If you are living in a place where you don’t have to constantly worry about your safety, you are actually already wealthier than so many people.

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Kerala has one of the lowest infant deaths in India at 5 per 1,000 births, while the national average is 25. But states like UP, MP and Chhattisgarh still lag behind.

Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), considered a vital measure of healthcare quality, is just 5 per 1,000 live births in Kerala, the lowest among all bigger states and far below the national average.

An IMR of 5 is an incredible achievement for Kerala’s health system, as it is even lower than the current infant mortality rate of 5.6 in United States.

[Dr Babu K V @drbabukv]

#TheKeralaStory

[CITIZEN VIGILANTE @vigilante_monk]

E20 petrol contains 20% ethanol blended with 80% pure petrol. The problem? All vehicle engines manufactured before 2023 are not designed to handle this blend. Ethanol, being hygroscopic, absorbs and retains moisture, which leads to rusting of fuel tanks, damage to oil seals, and incomplete combustion…. reducing power and lowering mileage.

No one is opposing the introduction of E20. The issue is that it’s being forced into non-compatible engines, voiding manufacturer warranties and causing costly damage. We’ve already paid over 40% in taxes when purchasing our vehicles …. the least the government can do is let us choose the fuel type our engines were actually built for.

we deserve the right to choose the fuel they were made for.