KSEAB declares SSLC exam-2 results with 27.67% pass rate, down nearly 4% from last year
This year, 87,330 passed out of more than 3.15 lakh candidates who appeared. The SSLC Exam-2 was conducted from May 26 to June 2. The number of students who failed in SSLC Exam-1 increased as the grace marks - which allowed an increase of up to 20% - were not given.
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Indian Express
2 days ago
- Indian Express
RRB NTPC Admit Card 2025: How to download when released?
The Railway Recruitment Boards (RRBs) are expected to release the RRB NTPC Admit Cards 2025 soon for the upcoming Computer-Based Test (CBT-1) for Non-Technical Popular Categories (Under Graduate). As per the official notice, the admit cards or e-call letters will be made available for download four days prior to the respective exam dates. Once released, candidates will be able to download their admit cards from the regional RRB websites such as and others. The first stage CBT for CEN 06/2024 is scheduled to be held from August 7 to September 9, over a period of 19 days. The link to view the exam city and date along with the facility to download travel authority for SC/ST candidates is already active on the official websites of all RRBs. Step 1: Visit the official Railway Recruitment Board website or the regional RRB portal through which you applied. Step 2: On the homepage, click on the link titled CEN 06/2024 (NTPC-UG): CBT-1 City-Intimation & E-Call Letter. Step 4: Enter your Registration Number (User ID), Password (Date of Birth in DD-MM-YYYY format), and the Captcha Code. Step 5: Click on the submit button. Your admit card will appear on the screen. Step 6: Download and print at least two copies of the admit card. Carry a hard copy to the examination centre on the day of the test. The RRB, in one of its notice has stated that for candidates who do not remember their registration credentials, the regional website also provides an option to retrieve the application number or reset the password using the 'Forget Password' link on the login page. The RRB NTPC CBT-1 exam will be a computer-based test comprising 100 multiple-choice questions for a total of 100 marks. The exam will be conducted over 90 minutes and will include three sections: General Awareness (40 questions for 40 marks) Mathematics (30 questions for 30 marks) General Intelligence and Reasoning (30 questions for 30 marks) There will be a negative marking of 1/3 mark for every incorrect answer. The test is designed to assess the candidate's aptitude, reasoning ability, and awareness of general subjects relevant to the NTPC roles.
The Hindu
2 days ago
- The Hindu
Is a River Alive? Unpacking the Politics of the Rights of Nature Movement
Published : Aug 02, 2025 14:11 IST - 8 MINS READ In a 2014 keynote address on writing in the anthropocene, the author Ursula K. Le Guin suggested a simple antidote to extractivist ideologies: 'One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as 'natural resources', is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.' This theme, of finding fellowship with ecosystems, of finding how best to channel human language to express the experience of a non-human other, forms the crux of the environmental humanities and literature scholar, Cambridge University professor, and bestselling nature writer Robert Macfarlane's recent book, Is A River Alive?, which sets out to 'imagine water otherwise'. It attempts to 'daylight long-buried ways of feeling about water, both in history and in us'. The answer to the question the title poses is yes, a river is alive, in what seems a no-brainer—as Macfarlane recounts in the book's introduction—to the author's 9-year-old son, Will. Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane Penguin Hamish Hamilton Pages: 384 Price: Rs.1,699 Set in the cloud forest of Los Cedros, Ecuador; Chennai, India, home to the Adyar, Kosasthalayar, and Cooum rivers; and Nitassinan/Canada, through which the Mutehekau Shipu river (also known as the Magpie) runs, the book explores past and present manifestations of the global rights-of-nature movement, animating the land- and waterscapes through which it runs in vivid, compelling detail. The debates surrounding an ecosystem's aliveness—which, paradoxically, makes it killable—loom large over the places and people the book undertakes to represent. Also Read | India's environmental pioneers: The forgotten story At one level, Macfarlane's intention is crystal clear: 'Rivers should not burn. Lakes should not need funerals. How has it come to this?' The many rivers embodied in this book are embattled to this day, denizens of the natural world over whom communities, environmental defenders, corporations, and governments have historically tussled. Macfarlane names them as his co-authors, averring that 'this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages'. He is accompanied in his sprawling transcontinental sojourn by some key humans as well: through Los Cedros by the mycologist Giuliana Furci, the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and the lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito; through Chennai by the naturalist-educator-writer Yuvan Aves and various other members of his Palluyir Trust; and along the Mutehekau Shipu with the 'river-people' and fellow kayakers Wayne Chambliss, Raph, Danny Peled, and Ilya Klvana. Landmark legislations To set the stage for these three far-flung encounters, Macfarlane chronicles celebrated rights-of-nature rulings such as the the passing of the Te Awa Tupua Act granting legal personhood in 2017 to the Whanganui river in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Uttarakhand court's recognition of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as living beings later in the same year. Such landmark legislation as the enshrining of the rights of nature in the Ecuadorian constitution and the ensuing recognition of the personhood of Los Cedros cloud forest in 2021, provide precedent and inspiration for further ecological action. An intricate welter of stakeholders and interests is revealed as Macfarlane digs deeper into each of the three cases. And yet, this global story on a grand scale is anchored to a tiny chalk stream near Macfarlane's home in Cambridge, to which the book and its author repeatedly return. Is A River Alive? is a soul-stirring paean to nature, deeply felt and thought, marvellously meditative, awash with literary, historical, and metaphysical detail representing indigenous voices and schools of thought as well as more canonical presences from Europe and North America. It is penned with imagistic ingenuity and precision by a seasoned scholar-practitioner and writer of place with the ability to instantly, intimately, render the unfamiliar familiar: 'The interior of a cloud-forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green. To be inside a cloud-forest is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized.' On the other hand, a dead olive ridley sea turtle on a Chennai beach is shockingly strange, simultaneously inducing grief and horror: 'Her eyes have been eaten from their sockets by the ghost crabs. This is the fifth turtle corpse we've met that day. The geometry of her shell-scales is beautiful even in death. She stares sightless from blue-white eyeholes.' The turtle serves as a stark reminder of senseless human cruelty and violence, juxtaposed with the reeking, mortally wounded rivers of Chennai and its overflowing beaches. Fusing riverine and human consciousness Also unfolding in this section is the remarkable life story of Yuvan Aves, his escape from a physically abusive stepfather, and eventual emergence as an ecological activist and educator during and after his years at Pathashaala, a J. Krishnamurti school on the outskirts of Chennai. Finding an admirer in Macfarlane, Aves' first book, Intertidal (2023), bears witness to the ravaging of Chennai's water bodies and marshlands even as it stands testament to human fortitude and the resilience of the natural world. Far from Chennai and on the road in Nitassinan/Canada next, Macfarlane describes the juggernaut that is hydroelectric power (its convoys advancing inexorably towards the Romaine river project) in contrasting strokes. 'A bird with a voice of water trills on, unseen. Vast, triple-wagoned trucks thunder eastwards, shaking earth and whipping tree branches with their back-blast.' Macfarlane counters these forces of industry by flinging the reader into a splendid, spinning, stream-of-consciousness vortex, fusing riverine and human consciousness towards the end. The book's exquisitely textured cover, designed from a linocut by the artist Stanley Donwood for both the UK and US editions (published by Penguin and W.W. Norton respectively), pays tribute to maps of the ancient Mississippi river imagined and crafted by the cartographer Harold Fisk in the 1940s: 'In them, the Mississippi comes to life: twisting like mating snakes, writhing with river ghosts.' In deep trouble Anyone reading Is A River Alive? should revisit in tandem Krupa Ge's ground-breaking 2019 book, Rivers Remember, a fiercely anguished insider account of Chennai's waterways that Macfarlane references alongside Nakkeeran's Neer Ezhuthu (also published in 2019). Ge's book, the first to fully acknowledge the trauma of the Adyar, Kosasthalayar, and Cooum, combines personal and intergenerational knowledge with painstaking political and legal explication to shine a light on the same Chennai rivers Macfarlane meets in 2025. She highlights the gruelling conditions under which sanitation workers, health workers, fishing communities, community organisers, and—astonishingly—Eelam refugees worked to alleviate suffering during the dread-inducing December 2015 'man-made flood'. Read together, the two books memorialise a unique culture of water storage and stewardship vanishing before our eyes, in which tanks, streams, ponds, rivers, and ocean were venerated throughout the Tamil region. Can rights-of-nature proponents truthfully engage with the material conditions under which humans live and work worldwide as part of the fight? Dwelling at length on whether rivers are alive is arguably a privilege. In the Global South, nature is not typically experienced at leisure through a window or contemplated in tranquillity as a painting in a frame. Macfarlane's own chaotic Chennai experience proves this point. For anyone seeking to protect the natural world in these contexts, there can be no ignoring the situation of communities whose livelihoods depend on the industries and governments that power nature's exploitation and destruction. Even as I write, Tamil Nadu is planning a 92 kilometre sealink flyover along its East Coast Road to ease traffic congestion—a heavy infrastructure and investment project with grave consequences for marine life, environmentalists assert. Will such 'progress' really benefit a choked city and its inhabitants, continually reeling from cycles of flood and drought? As recent protests against deforestation in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Manipur in the midst of heatwaves and other signs of a rapidly accelerating ecological crisis illustrate, the natural world is in deep trouble. So are humans. The plot thickens. Unconvinced by what he sees as Macfarlane's irrational animism, the writer and evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper dubs Is A River Alive? 'anti-science' in his recent review of the book for New Scientist. Rivers simply are not living beings, in Hooper's estimate. But he does admit the need for ecological thinking that emphasises the interconnectedness of all life forms to replace 'the Cartesian justification for exploitation'. Hooper's blithe confidence in science and scientific reasoning is somewhat troubling as is his wholesale rejection of Macfarlane's premise. Implicit in Hooper's dismissal of 'spiritualism' as unscientific is the erasure of traditional/indigenous ways of knowing, and centuries-old practices of situated cognition and wisdom that Macfarlane has, to his credit, assiduously assembled and honoured throughout. Also Read | Moments in the sands of time Must science always advance at the expense of the soul? Has not this sort of either-or framing deepened divides and brought societies and cultures the world over to this current, polarised pass? 'Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe,' Le Guin concluded in the same keynote address from 2014 with which this essay began. In her view, science has the capacity to 'increase moral sensitivity' while poetry can 'move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings'. If the twain shall ever meet, perhaps science and poetry can together keep us all alive. Akhila Ramnarayan is a writer, theatre actor, indie musician, and college educator at Krea University.
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business Standard
Goa to roll out new salt-tolerant paddy variety for 2026 kharif season
Goa's latest paddy seed variety, which offers improved resilience against salinity, waterlogging, and crop lodging, is likely to be released for large-scale cultivation in the Kharif season 2026, state Agriculture Minister Ravi Naik has said. In a written reply in the legislative assembly on Friday, Naik said that the new variety is currently in its second year of on-farm trials and has already shown promising results in demonstration plots under the Minikit Programme. He was responding to a question by independent MLA Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenco. According to the data furnished by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Goa Dhan-5 was developed to build on the performance of earlier salt-tolerant varieties Goa Dhan-1 and Dhan-2 released in 2017, and Dhan-3 and Dhan-4 released in 2019, the minister said. Naik said that while the first four Dhan varieties are tolerant to saline conditions, Goa Dhan-5 stands out for its added resistance to waterlogging and complete or partial submergence for 10 to 15 days, making it suitable for the state's flood-prone and coastal agricultural zones. "It also has a strong culm, which improves resistance to lodging a common issue that affects plant stability and yield during heavy rains and wind," he stated. The minister further said that the trial results indicate Goa Dhan-5 yields around six tonnes per hectare under normal conditions and four to four and half tonnes under saline conditions. "More than 40 farmers in Amona, Chorao, Neura, Shiroda, and Cumbarzua villages in both North and South Goa are cultivating the variety as part of the ongoing demonstration phase," he said. The seed variety is expected to be formally proposed for release to the State Variety Release Committee (SVRC) after reviewing its performance during the current Kharif season. If cleared, seeds will be made available to farmers in time for the next planting cycle, he added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
