-The Hindu Once slotted as vermin, these animals are "open season" and could become easy game for hunters as well as traders in meat. Since 2015, the Union Environment Ministry has acceded to requests from Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Bihar to declare wild boar, rhesus macaque, and nilgai as vermin within specified territories of these States, and outside forests and protected areas. This reprieve means that those who kill these animals here...

-The Hindu Jaipur: Rajasthan is the first State to create a separate Gaupalan Ministry for ensuring the protection of cows. The high-level team, headed by the Gaupalan Department’s Additional Director, has found that the deaths occurred due to consumption of polythene and other inedible substances as well as extreme weakness. “No symptoms of communicable or seasonal diseases were found in the cows,” Shailesh Sharma, Director of Gaupalan Department, said here on Friday. The government...

-The Hindu Gaya (Bihar)/ Gumla (Jharkhand): It was a few tense minutes for nearly 1,000 residents gathered under a shamiana in Bharno block office in Gumla district, about 50 kilometres south of Ranchi. The crowd was awaiting the arrival of Sunil Kumar Keshari, the ration shop dealer of Bharno. “Out of 200 residents of Pandarni village, only three can get rations from Keshari’s shop,” said Sukramani, a resident of the village. Clearly it...

-The Hindu Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, on Wednesday, held an inter-ministerial meeting to discuss the spiralling prices of food and carve out a strategy to cool inflation. Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu attended the meeting. Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian was also present. During the meeting, discussions were held to devise ways to meet the gap between demand...

-The Hindu The RCEP is a regional trade agreement being negotiated between the 10 ASEAN countries currently in Auckland. Humanitarian aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has warned India that the country will not remain ‘pharmacy of the developing world’ if the proposals in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement (RCEP) are adopted. The RCEP is a regional trade agreement being negotiated between the 10 ASEAN countries currently in Auckland. MSF Access Campaign...