-The Hindu Business Line ‘Higher output due to other factors’ Much of the increase in cotton yields in India cannot be attributed to the adoption of transgenic cotton, as claimed earlier, but to other factors such as increase in area of cultivation, fertiliser use, better irrigation and new class of insecticides in last 15 years, according to a new study. The study appeared in the journal Nature Plants last week. It was the...

-The Hindu Data reveals that 11.64% of children enrolled in class I in the 2017-18 academic year were below the age of 6 Chennai: Nearly 11.64 % of children who enrolled in Class I in the 2017-2018 academic year in Tamil Nadu had enrolled before they turned 6. Six years is the minimum age mandated by the Right to Education (RTE) Act for class I. In the 2015 and 2016 academic years...

-Hindustan Times “We are trying to calm the peoples’ frayed nerves. The daily sharing of data is creating panic. People are buying masks and hoarding hand sanitisers,” said Dr Rajan Sharma, IMA president. New Delhi: The Indian Medical Association urged the government on Wednesday not to share novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases daily, arguing the move would lead to panic even though the World Health Organisation declared it a pandemic. “We appeal to...

-Newsclick.in It is not just about electricity, playground and boundary walls, but the government schools lack infrastructure—classrooms, library, labs, etc. Identifying the shortfalls in budgetary funding and utilisation, a parliamentary panel on education has found that close to half of government schools across the country don’t have access to electricity or proper playgrounds. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development (HRD), in its report—Demands for Grants 2020-21 Analysis—which was submitted to Rajya...

As body count due to Delhi riots (some call it pogrom) rise above 45, it is essential to look at the official data related to communal incidents in the country. It is from the annual report of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA), one gets information about the number of communal incidents in different years, apart from the number of persons injured and killed in those incidents. There is one...