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India is now recording more infections per day — as many as 350,000 — than any other country has since the pandemic began, and that’s just the official number, which most experts think is a vast underestimation.

New Delhi, India’s sprawling capital of 20 million, is suffering a calamitous surge. A few days ago, the positivity rate hit a staggering 36 percent — meaning more than one out of three people tested were infected. A month ago, it was less than 3 percent.

The infections have spread so fast that hospitals have been completely swamped. People are turned away by the thousands. Medicine is running out. So is lifesaving oxygen.

Experts had always warned that Covid-19 could wreak real havoc in India. This country is enormous — 1.4 billion people. And densely populated. And in many places, very poor.

A new variant known here as “the double mutant” may be doing a lot of the damage. The science is still early but from what we know, this variant contains one mutation that may make the virus more contagious and another that may make it partially resistant to vaccines.

India is a story of scale, and it cuts both ways. It has a lot of people, a lot of needs and a lot of suffering. But it also has lot of technology, industrial capacity and resources, both human and material.

However difficult and dangerous it feels in Delhi for all of us, it’s probably going to get worse. Epidemiologists say the numbers will keep climbing, to 500,000 reported cases a day nationwide and as many as one million Indians dead from Covid-19 by August.

Mr. Modi remains popular among his base but more people are blaming him for failing to prepare India for this surge and for holding packed political rallies in recent weeks where few precautions were enforced — possible super-spreader events.

“Social distancing norms have gone for a complete toss,” said one Delhi newscaster the other day, during a broadcast of one of Mr. Modi’s rallies.

He is seen stabbing her repeatedly as people walk by, before hitting her on the head with a stone and kicking her.

Locals did eventually intervene when he tried to escape.

"She was attacked as she was walking with her cousin at around 9am. It seems that the assailant started liking her when they used to be neighbours earlier, but since he was married, she never paid attention," senior police official Esha Pandey told the BBC.

Earlier deputy commissioner of police, Madhur Verma, told reporters that "the family had lodged a complaint four-five months back and both the families had reached a compromise".

On Sunday evening, 28-year-old Laxmi was stabbed to death in front of her house in full view of her neighbours by a man who then killed himself, the Times of India newspaper reported .

Roshan Shankar, an adviser to the Delhi government, said the authorities had regained control of a canal that supplied water to New Delhi, though the canal was badly damaged. For now, he said, the government was using existing reserves and other water bodies to meet the need. He said severe, widespread shortages had not been reported so far.

Nevertheless, he added, officials were “trying to get people to ration.”

A Jat leader, Satpal Singh Sangwan, a retired government official, said in an interview that officials had assured him that the Jat group would be added to a list of more than 2,000 other groups considered “backward,” making their members eligible for quotas in government jobs and university admissions.

A year ago, another relatively prosperous caste group, in the state of Gujarat, also demanded, unsuccessfully, to be part of the “backward classes.” Yet the latest caste protests are only the most violent and visible in what has been a steady stream of requests from different caste groups claiming to be “backward.”

It is one of the country’s major paradoxes that a population that has been trying for decades to rid itself of the caste system finds so many groups demanding to be ranked lower on the socioeconomic ladder in order to advance themselves economically.

Experts say the trend is being driven by increasing numbers of Indians who fear being left behind in the rapidly modernizing economy and who see government quotas as the only tangible way they can gain influence to help better themselves economically.

Vast numbers of Indians now “feel totally helpless with regard to the economy and private capital,” said Satish Deshpande, a sociology professor at Delhi University.

Despite the economic liberalization that began here in the 1990s, many people still lack jobs and educational opportunities, intensifying the competition for the age-old staple of government jobs.

Almost half of government jobs and university seats in the country are reserved for members of special groups.

India’s Constitution guarantees equality to all, but it also enshrines caste-based affirmative action for the lowest social group, the Dalits, known in legal terms as scheduled castes, and for indigenous forest-dwellers, known as scheduled tribes. In time, the government created a third group, the Other Backward Classes.

In many cases, groups flex their electoral muscles to induce the government to add them to the list of groups considered backward.The Jats started on that path. In 2014, as national elections approached, the incumbent Congress party agreed to their demand for backward status. But the Supreme Court struck down the decision last year, noting that a commission set up to review the program had refused to recommend such a step for the group.

The Jat protests became so out of hand over the weekend that the Indian Army had to be called in. Mr. Das said several protesters were killed in clashes with another caste group whose property was being burned. Other people were killed when law enforcement officials fired at protesters who had turned violent, he said. At least 19 people in all have been killed, Mr. Das said.

The riots also disrupted businesses. Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s biggest car manufacturer, said over the weekend that it had suspended manufacturing at two area factories.

I’m sitting in my apartment waiting to catch the disease. That’s what it feels like right now in New Delhi with the world’s worst coronavirus crisis advancing around us.

The sick have been left stranded in interminable lines at hospital gates or at home, literally gasping for air.

Medicine is running out. So is lifesaving oxygen.

Although New Delhi is locked down, the disease is still rampaging.

India was doing well up until a few weeks ago, at least on the surface. It locked down, absorbed the first wave, then opened up. It maintained a low death rate (at least by official statistics). By winter, life in many respects had returned to something near normal.

“The deaths happened between Sunday and Monday morning, but we can’t say all died due to lack of oxygen,”

Last week, after oxygen ran out at one hospital in India’s capital, New Delhi, 12 people died. The week before that, it was 20

Doctors at dozens of hospitals in Delhi have been warning that they have come dangerously close to running out as well and that it was untenable to keep waiting for last-minute supplies to arrive. As the latest incident shows, at a hospital more than a thousand miles from the capital, oxygen shortages have now spread nationwide.

The same thing happened at Jaipur Golden Hospital in New Delhi.

While people continue to die from a lack of oxygen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the local government in Delhi, the epicenter of the oxygen crisis, are fighting in court.

Representatives of the federal government told the court on Sunday that its officials are working hard to deal with the crises and any such order would have a demoralizing effect on them.

India has been receiving aid from other countries, and many have airlifted oxygen generators, including France, which delivered eight oxygen generator plants on Sunday, and from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The country has also received six planeloads of equipment and supplies including material for coronavirus vaccines from the United States.

In recent days delays in moving oxygen to the hospitals in cities that are far from the generating plants have caused deaths which could have been avoided, experts said. On Saturday 12 patients, including a doctor, died when a hospital in New Delhi ran out of oxygen for an hour, according to Sudhanshu Bankata, an official of the Batra Hospital, where the deaths took place.

“We are living from oxygen cylinder to oxygen cylinder,” she said.Medical oxygen has suddenly become one of the most precious resources in India, and the need for it will continue as the surge of coronavirus infections is hardly abating.

The investigation at the hospital continues. On Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. doctors and paramedical staff said they had run out of oxygen and contacted everyone they could think of to get help.

Officials in the neighboring district of Mysore, which is one of the hot virus spots in the state, said they sent supplies late on Sunday evening, but Chamarajanagar district officials said none arrived at the hospital.

When she arrived at the hospital her father-in-law told her she was now a widow. Her husband had died early on Monday, during that 10-hour period when the hospital was out of oxygen.

At least one farmer reportedly died.

After nightfall Tuesday, those unions called off the tractor rally. Farmers climbed down from the ramparts of the Red Fort. But they did not go home. They returned only to their protest camps, on the outskirts of Delhi — from which they're planning another march on the capital in less than a week.

The biggest factor making this kind of climate initiative possible, after so many years of inaction, is the spectacular technological progress in renewable energy that has taken place since 2009 or so. This means that we can greatly reduce emissions using carrots instead of sticks: giving people incentives to use low-emission technologies rather than trying to regulate or tax them into giving up high-emission activities.

the politics of carrots are obviously a lot easier than the politics of sticks.

Above all, real G.D.P. says nothing about how stuff is produced. A kilowatt-hour of electricity counts the same whether it was generated by burning coal or wind power, but the environmental impact is completely different.

So let’s talk about why such claims are all wrong.

many people don’t understand what economic growth means, imagining that it necessarily involves producing the same things you were producing before, in the same ways, but just at a larger scale.

But that’s not at all what growth means. Currently, America’s real gross domestic product is about a third larger than it was in 2007. But the economy of 2023 isn’t just the economy of 2007 scaled up by a third. Production of some goods has gone way down — coal production has been cut roughly in half.

at this precise moment — the most hopeful moment for the environment, as far as I can tell, in decades — my inbox has been filling up with woeful claims that environmental protection is incompatible with economic growth. These claims are oddly bipartisan. Some of them come from people on the left who insist that the planet can’t be saved unless we give up on the notion of perpetual economic growth. Others come from people on the right who insist that we must give up on all this environmentalism if we want to preserve prosperity.

In fact, environmental quality is often better in rich countries, with high G.D.P. per capita, than in middle-income countries

As a result, there’s no reason a growing economy must place an increasing burden on the environment.

the environmental Kuznets curve.

, a comparison between the New York metropolitan area and Delhi, India. Delhi has a larger population but a much smaller G.D.P. So does New York’s big economy mean a highly stressed environment?

how does air quality in the two cities compare? As anyone who’s visited both places knows, New York air is, well, relatively OK, while Delhi air … isn’t.

at higher levels of development, delinking growth from environmental impact isn’t just possible in principle but something that happens a lot in practice.

Here’s a favorite chart of mine from the invaluable Our World in Data website. It shows carbon dioxide emissions per capita in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began. The early phases of industrialization were indeed associated with a huge rise in emissions. But more recently emissions have fallen back to the levels of the ’50s — the 1850s:

How did Britain do that? Part of the answer is that over time the British economy switched from relying on coal to relying on hydrocarbons, which when burned generate less carbon dioxide. Britain also learned to use energy more efficiently over time. But more recently a big factor has been the rise of renewable energy, especially, in Britain’s case, wind power

So when you hear an environmentalist say something like, “We live on a finite planet, so we can’t have unlimited economic growth,” what they’re actually revealing is that they don’t understand what economic growth means

in practice, they’re lending aid and comfort to anti-environmentalists, who want us to believe that protecting the environment is incompatible with rising living standards.

That said, while it’s possible to decouple growth from environmental harm, that’s not automatic. To combine rising living standards with an improving environment, we need policies that encourage the use of technologies that cause less environmental damage.

The good news is that the United States is finally implementing such policies. Still, we need a lot more action along those lines — not just in America but in the rest of the world. So we can do this — but we need to try, and not give in to counsels of despair.

the A.A.P.’s startling victory is a turning point because it marks the advent of a new kind of politics in India.

“Americans don’t really grasp how pollution impacts their lives,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University and the study’s lead author. “You say, ‘My uncle went to the hospital and died of a heart attack.’ You don’t say the heart attack was caused by air pollution, so we don’t know. It’s still a big killer here. It’s much bigger than from people who die from plane crashes or war or terrorism, but we don’t see the link so clearly

The models calculated about 7 million deaths per year if governments fail to work toward zero emissions by the end of the century, starting today.

they “calculated the human health impacts of pollution exposure under each scenario all over the world — but focusing on results in major cities — using well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths,”

Shindell used an automaker’s problem with faulty ignition switches in 2014 to further illustrate his point. When the switches failed, more than 3 million recalls were involved and auto executives were summoned to Washington to testify before Congress. “But the combined tailpipes of automobiles kill dozens and dozens more people than faulty ignition switches,” the researcher said. “We should be far more worried about pollution than the things we actually worry about.

“There’s got to be a significant amount of progress within the 2020s or it’s too late,” Shindell said. Even for the researchers, it’s a pie-in-the-sky goal, given that South Asian nations such as India, where pollution is among the worst in the world, argue correctly that their per-capita use is small compared with historical use in the Western Hemisphere and that they should be allowed time to develop just as other countries did.

Ambikapur is one of the cities at the front of the charge. It boasts 100% door-to-door waste collection and segregation, and was the second-cleanest in government rankings this year. It also generates about 1.2 million rupees (13,000 pounds sterling) a month selling plastic and recycled paper to private companies. The collected plastic from the Garbage Cafe will be used to construct roads – in 2015, the Ambikapur authorities built an entire road out of plastic. “It has lasted really well, even during the monsoon rains,” said Tirkey.

It has now reached the capital, New Delhi, where municipal authorities plan to open several Garbage Cafes along the lines of the one in Ambikapur. About 70% of the city’s plastic waste is single use, and most of it ends up in landfills or clogging drains. It is a particular menace for hungry cows who end up rummaging through garbage bins and eating plastic. Last year, a vet in Delhi removed 70kg of plastic from a cow’s stomach.

Tirkey stresses the importance of that loop. “What’s important is that our meals are nutritious and tasty. We didn’t want to give rubbish.”

Bilateral relations remained fraught over the last few months of the year. Islamabad issued constant broadsides against New Delhi for its continued security lockdown in Kashmir. By year’s end, an internet blackout was still in effect. Then, in December, India’s parliament passed a controversial new citizenship law that affords fast-track paths to Indian citizenship for religious minorities—but not Muslims—fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

This means Afghanistan is unlikely to have a new government in place for at least another few months, and even longer if the final results are different from the initial ones and require a second vote. Due to winter weather in Afghanistan, a runoff likely wouldn’t occur until the spring. Without a new government in place, it beggars belief that Afghanistan could launch a process to establish an intra-Afghan dialogue, much less negotiate an end to the war.

The two nuclear-armed nations will enter 2020 just one big trigger event away from war. The trigger could be another mass-casualty attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir traced back to a Pakistan-based group, or—acting on the threats issued repeatedly by New Delhi in 2019—an Indian preemptive operation to seize territory in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. 

Just around the headland is Sevastopol, the protected port and naval base where Tolstoy once served on the ramparts. During the Second World War, it was besieged and leveled by German bombers despite a heroic stand by the Soviet Army and partisans

An hour’s car ride away is Yalta, where czars vacationed and Chekhov wrote “The Cherry Orchard.”

In 1783, when Catherine the Great wrested control from the Tatar khan and the Ottoman Turks, hundreds of thousands of Tatars fled the advancing Russian armies. A century and a half later, in 1944, those who remained behind were scooped up by Stalin and deported to Central Asia

Has Crimea also now become a Sudetenland? Or is it just a Grenada? Some Western commentators have already suggested the former, comparing President Vladimir V. Putin’s dispatch of Russian forces to Hitler’s 1938 annexation of German-populated parts of Czechoslovakia.

The United States typically interprets its own actions through the lens of its principles. It reads the principles of other countries from their behavior. In most instances that leads to precisely the hypocrisies that Russia, China and other countries find so easy to condemn.

This interpretive frame may be hard to understand, but some things are not wrong just because Russians happen to believe them. Russian news crews were covering a real story in Ukraine: the chaotic dismantling of a legally sanctioned government, the quick breakdown of an agreed framework for new elections, and the creeping transformation of political disputes into ethnic ones.

he Crimean affair is a grand experiment in Mr. Putin’s strategy of equivalence: countering every criticism of his government’s behavior with a page from the West’s own playbook. If his government has a guiding ideology, it is not the concept of restoring the old Soviet Union. It is rather his commitment to exposing what Russian politicians routinely call the “double standards” of American and European foreign policy and revealing the hidden workings of raison d’état — the hardnosed and pragmatic calculation of interests that average citizens from Moscow to Beijing to New Delhi actually believe drives the policies of all great powers.

In a poll carried out in late February by the independent, Moscow-based Levada Center, 43 percent of Russians called the overthrow of Mr. Yanukovych a violent coup and 23 percent labeled the developing situation a civil war. A plurality of respondents saw the entire affair as an orchestrated attempt by the West to draw Ukraine into its geopolitical orbit.

First, the European Union, the United States, and Russia must all agree that the principal goal is to prevent greater violence

European and American officials must be clear on the reasons why the international community should band together to condemn Russian actions. It is not because of the violation of national sovereignty — a concept imperfectly defended by Americans and Europeans in recent years — but because Mr. Putin’s reserving the right to protect the “Russian-speaking population” of Ukraine is an affront to the basis of international order

It is Mr. Putin who has made ethnic nationalism a defining element of foreign policy.

The future of Ukraine is now no longer about Kiev’s Independence Square, democracy in Ukraine or European integration. It is about how to preserve a vision of Europe — and, indeed, of the world — where countries give up the idea that people who speak a language we understand are the only ones worth protecting.

“This award is for all those children who are voiceless, whose voices need to be heard,” she said. “I speak for them, and I stand up with them.”

Amid the debate about the politics of her celebrity, few question the heroism of Ms. Yousafzai — a charismatic and exceptionally eloquent teenager who has followed an astonishing trajectory since being airlifted from Pakistan’s Swat Valley. At just 17, she has visited with President Obama and the queen of England, addressed the United Nations, and become the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize since it was created in 1901.

In Pakistan, she has come to symbolize the country’s existential struggle against Islamist violence.

Mr. Satyarthi, 60, a veteran, soft-spoken activist based in New Delhi who has rescued trafficked children from slavery

Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.

One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, it says.

38 percent of women who are murdered are killed by their partners.Continue reading the main story

Where there are laws on the books, like ones that criminalize domestic violence, for instance, they are not reliably enforced.

Mr Biju, of the University of Delhi, is known as The Frog Man in India, for discovering 89 of the country's 350 or so frog species.

It has changed from Polypedates jerdonii - named after Thomas Jerdon, the British zoologist that collected the previously only known specimens in 1870 - to Frankixalus jerdonii, after herpetologist Franky Bossuyt - Mr Biju's adviser when he studied at Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium.

Phone-card sellers also tend to push whatever makes them the most money. Mr. Khan noted that another carrier had recently awarded him his choice of a Hero motorcycle or 45,000 rupees — nearly $700 — for signing up 1,000 customers. Reliance offered nothing similar.

“This is a program that is working to bring people online, and working incredibly well.” Mr. Daniels said. “Connectivity is something that improves people’s lives. It’s an enabler for people to be able to help themselves find jobs, help themselves improve their health situation, improve their education for themselves and their children.”

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is still mulling potential regulations. In a recent interview, however, the agency’s chairman, Ram Sewak Sharma, was skeptical of Internet.org. “Maybe they have wonderful objectives, but the way it is being implemented, that’s not really appropriate,” he said.

“And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.”

“For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late,”

“We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its most destructive effects,” he said.

“What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it,”

Mr. Obama has staked much of his legacy on ensuring success here, spending much of the past year courting the leaders of China, India and other major emitters in hopes they would finally agree to slow their rapidly rising use of coal and other carbon-intensive fuels.

They stopped at the site immediately after Mr. Obama landed at Orly Airport and was driven through the quiet and largely blocked-off streets of Paris.

Mr. Hollande arrived at the climate talks at 7:46 a.m. and was greeted by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who was accompanied by Mr. Hollande’s former partner, the minister of ecology, Ségolène Royal.

Citing climate change as “a huge challenge,” Mr. Xi said it was “very important for China and the United States to be firmly committed to the right direction of building a new model of major country relations,” including by “partnering with each other to help the climate conference deliver its expected targets.”

“As the two largest economies in the world and the two largest carbon-emitters, we have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “And so our leadership on this issue has been absolutely vital, and I appreciate President Xi’s consistent cooperation on this issue.”

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of business and philanthropy leaders led by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates who have a combined total of $350 billion in private wealth, have pledged to invest in moving clean-energy technologies from laboratories to the marketplace.

“Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow,” he wrote in a column published in The Financial Times. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.

In exchange, India was demanding free technology from other countries as well as significant financial aid. India has some incentives to cooperate with broader plans to curb emissions. Some studies suggest that more Indians could be displaced as a result of rising seas than people from any other country, that cities in India are already among the world’s most polluted, and that nearly a fifth of deaths in India are caused in part by air pollution.