Counterview

By Bharat Dogra   The Hindustan Times, a leading newspaper, reported on May 20, 2026, that twice this season the country’s highest daily temperature has been recorded in the city of Banda , located close to the Ken river in Uttar Pradesh, in the Bundelkhand region (which comprises 14 districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh).

By Vikas Meshram   An invisible enemy has now made its home on farmlands across the world — and that enemy is the raging fury of rising temperatures. The picture painted by the joint report “ Extreme Heat and Agriculture ” from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is not merely alarming; it is directly linked to human existence itself. 

By Rajkumar Sinha*  According to recent studies, urban areas are witnessing a much sharper rise in temperatures than rural regions. The planet is currently heading toward an additional 1.9°C of warming — far beyond the target envisioned under the Paris Agreement . A team of climate scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that India’s average temperature increased by nearly 0.9°C during the decade between 2015 and 2024 compared to the early twentieth century (1901–1930). In western and northeastern India, the hottest day of the year has already become 1.5°C to 2°C warmer since the 1950s.

By Bharat Dogra   The National Alliance of People’s Movements has strongly criticized the arrests and repression of villagers and activists protesting against displacement linked to the Ken-Betwa Link Project (KBLP) in the Bundelkhand region . However, opposition to the controversial project has not been limited to grassroots groups. Since its inception, the project has faced criticism from government bodies, court-appointed authorities, retired officials and environmental experts.

By Ravi Ranjan*  In the churn of India’s cities, where construction cranes redraw skylines and familiar landmarks vanish overnight, the question of belonging has become urgent. Hindi poet Arun Kamal captured this disquiet decades ago in his deceptively simple poem Naye Ilāke Mein (In the New Locality). A man loses his way in a newly developing neighborhood. What seems like a minor inconvenience unfolds into a metaphor for the postmodern condition: the dissolution of stability, the unreliability of memory, and the fragility of identity in a world of relentless change.

By Biljana Vankovska  When law graduates and students (joined by participants from neighbouring Kosovo and Albania) marched through Skopje in recent days demanding the right to take the bar exam in Albanian, the protests quickly became something far larger than a dispute over a legal procedure. Alongside banners invoking language rights and the presence of only Albanian and US flags, the symbols of the UÇK also appeared prominently. It shifted the demonstration from a narrowly professional claim into a politically charged act of historical and regional symbolism. Namely, UÇK is the Albanian acronym for two intertwined paramilitary movements born of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.