Rajeev Kumar

Portal glitches, blurred scans, and evaluation anomalies exposed weaknesses in the rollout of the OSM system. Robust SOPs, secure digital infrastructure, and free access to answer scripts can help restore accountability and public trust in the evaluation process

A simple transparency-first approach—without fees, portals, or procedural hurdles—based on disclosure of answer scripts, student verification, and targeted re-evaluation could have enabled independent score verification and correction, while avoiding much of the controversy surrounding CBSE’s...

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Background Phosphorus (P) availability and soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics within soil aggregates play critical roles in regulating nutrient uptake and crop productivity. However, the interactive effects of mineral P, organic manure, and soil P status on organic P pools remain poorly understood. This study evaluated how long-term mineral P fertilization and cattle manure (CM) influence aggregate-associated P pools, SOC retention, and wheat productivity in soils with high (HGP) and medium (MDP) Olsen-P status. Methods A long-term field experiment consisted of mineral P fertilization rates of 0, 13, 26, and 39 kg P ha− 1, CM alone, and integrated P + CM treatments. Soil samples were fractionated into aggregate-size classes to quantify aggregate-associated organic P fractions and SOC, while soil pH, Olsen-P, and wheat yield were also determined to assess treatment effects under contrasting soil P status. Results Labile organic P (LBPo) increased with mineral P up to 26 kg ha− 1, particularly in macroaggregates (> 2.3 mm). Integrated P26 + CM further increased organic P fractions by 18% (HGP) and 23% (MDP) compared to CM alone. Similar, but to a lesser extent, increases in LBPo and SOC were observed in aggregates of 1.18–0.6 mm and 0.3–0.075 mm. Aggregate-associated SOC increased by 18.6% (HGP) and 61.5% (MDP). While P fertilization lowered soil pH, it significantly raised Olsen-P. Maximum wheat yields were achieved at 13 kg P ha− 1 in HGP soils and 26 kg P ha− 1 in MDP soils. Integrated P + CM treatments produced the highest wheat yields under both Olsen-P status soils. In HGP soils, P13 + CM and P26 + CM resulted in statistically comparable yields, whereas P26 + CM produced the maximum yield in MDP soils. Conclusions Soil Olsen-P status and aggregate size regulate organic P stabilization and SOC retention. Integrating CM with mineral P is the most effective strategy for enhancing aggregate-associated SOC and sustaining wheat productivity in soils with contrasting P status.

Proposed transparency framework addresses CBSE-OSM issues, questioning the fairness of mark revisions and advocating for independent scrutiny of answer scripts.

Background The annual burning of 500–900 million tons of crop residues releases nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO₂ equivalents and severely degrades soil quality, causing 25–30% losses in soil organic carbon and 40–60% reductions in nitrogen. This unsustainable practice increases fertilizer requirements by 15–20% to sustain crop yields. Converting crop residues into biochar offers a sustainable alternative that mitigates air pollution, improves soil fertility, enhances carbon sequestration, and increases agricultural productivity. Aim This study evaluated the effect of biochar application on soil properties, wheat growth, and yield performance. Methods A two-year field experiment was conducted on wheat (PBW 824) at the Agriculture Research Farm of Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India. Treatments included a control, recommended fertilizer doses, nitrogen and phosphorus alone, and nitrogen and phosphorus combined with rice husk or rice straw biochar applied at 5, 10, and 15 t/ha. Results Biochar application significantly improved crop performance, with the most pronounced effects observed under RSB & RHB doses at 5 t/ha. Compared to non-biochar treatments, this rate increased plant height (12.8%), tillers (49.8%), leaf area index (43.3%), crop growth rate (25.4%), spike length (34.2%), grains per spike (40.6%), test weight (19.6%), biological yield (17.2%), grain yield (32.8%), and harvest index (13.4%). Conclusions Application of biochar at 5 t/ha is an effective and sustainable strategy for enhancing soil physical properties, nutrient availability, plant growth, and wheat productivity, while improving soil moisture retention and reducing soil hardness.

In this work, we present the Adaptive Multimodal Attention Network (AMAN), a new deep learning model for resilient, scalable and fair prediction of climate change impacts on agriculture. Climate change poses a dire threat to food security, but impacts vary across agro-ecological regions, which existing unimodal, non-adaptive models do not address. AMAN overcomes these challenges by integrating satellite, climate and geospatial soil data using a collection of modality-specific encoders (Spatiotemporal Vision Transformer, Temporal Fusion Transformer, and Graph Attention Network) and a domain-adaptive cross-modal attention network. An adaptive learning framework involves two steps: pre-training a foundation model on abundant data and fast-adapting through Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). AMAN is evaluated on five target agricultural regions, and outperforms the baselines: crop yield MAE is 8.3% lower, drought stress RMSE 11.6% lower, and 9.4% better cross-region generalization in the low-data target region. The key insight is that MAML adaptation for domain transfer significantly improves over fine-tuning in low-data regions, reaching comparable performance with only 10 target labels, compared to 50 + for the best baseline. AMAN generalizes to 500 + diverse agricultural regions with low inference costs (2x). Attention and SHAP analyses show that AMAN pinpoints the climatic and edaphic factors driving vulnerability, enabling practical, climate-smart agricultural planning and food security strategies.

Although engineering education is expected to power the country's AI revolution, it is steadily losing its sheen. The challenge is no longer expanding engineering seats, but producing globally competitive engineers.

Following Re-NEET 2026, the NTA has allowed candidates to challenge provisional answer keys and verify scanned OMR responses. However, they must pay Rs 200 per objection.