-Newslaundry.com The state’s River Training Policy appears designed to allow near unfettered mining of sand and boulders by private contractors, bypassing green clearance and scientific assessment. In November 2020, a few months before floods ravaged Uttarakhand, the deputy collector of Purnagiri in Tanakpur district announced an open auction of tenders to desilt the riverbed in Champawat’s villages. Tenders for government work usually seek the lowest bidder, the contractor willing to do the job...

-The Hindu Official secrecy on pandemic policies aggravates a crisis In August 2020, the Modi government constituted the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) as a nodal agency on all matters related to vaccine administration and rollout. Asked under the Right to Information (RTI) Act for details of the NEGVAC’s meetings, the Health Ministry, which anchors the expert group, replied that it does not know where the concerned documents...

-TheThirdPole.net A response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative has to contend with a history of authoritarian, carbon-heavy development that both China and its opponents have pursued In a phone call to the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on 26 March, US President Joe Biden said that “democratic countries should have an infrastructure plan to rival China’s Belt and Road initiative”. This statement has been the focus of intense scrutiny in Central...

-TheLeaflet.in Explaining the predicament of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) when opting for payment claims under the MSME Development Act, 2006, VIVEK SHARMA writes about why, in practice, the statutory compound interest enshrined in the law is rarely executed, and offers suggestions to bolster the law and secure the interests of MSMEs in this regard. MICRO, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) play a significant role in India’s GDP and export story....

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...