-The Indian Express After cotton last year, the BJP state government faces a fresh challenge ahead of late-2017 elections. Rajkot: GROUNDNUT FARMERS last week forced a suspension of auctions at the agriculture produce market committee (APMC) mandi in Amreli to protest against tumbling prices of Gujarat’s second biggest cash crop after cotton. The new groundnut-in-shell crop is fetching around Rs 3,500 per quintal, well below the minimum support price (MSP) of Rs...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court had recently said security forces had no inherent right to shoot people, which suggests that yesterday's killing of the eight Simi operatives by Madhya Pradesh police went against that ruling. The court had held that even if a person was seen carrying weapons in a "disturbed" area, it did not automatically give the security forces the right to shoot him. Even the army had no blanket...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre plans to track every student enrolled in every private or government school in the country by their Aadhaar numbers to keep tabs on dropout rates. Those among the 26 crore students who do not have Aadhaar cards will be given a unique 18-digit number by which they will be tracked till they get their Aadhaar numbers. The idea behind the ID-based tracking system is to log the...

-The Hindu The avian flu virus was first detected in migratory birds in New Delhi Jaipur: After deaths of migratory birds due to avian flu were reported in Delhi, an alert was sounded in Rajasthan over the weekend, asking authorities and the public at large to keep a watch on the health of birds and take precautionary measures to check the likely outbreak of bird flu in the State. A communiqué received by...

-The Telegraph The death of more than 50 dengue patients in eight city hospitals this year offers a peek into the severity of the menace but the extent of the crisis remains unknown in the absence of figures from the government. To put things in perspective, the disease caused by the Aedes aegypti mosquito had claimed less than 20 lives across the state last year. The Mamata Banerjee government's decision to prefer secrecy...