-NationalGeographic.com She grew up in an affluent New York town but soon after college, Ajaita Shah went to her parents’ native India to work with the poor JAIPUR: “I saw a 5-year-old die in five seconds,” says Ajaita Shah, recalling the Indian girl enveloped by a kerosene fire at home. “There was nothing we could do.” Not then. But since that 2008 disaster, Shah has helped cut the use of kerosene lamps in...

-TheNorthEastToday.com DIMAPUR: Nagaland Governor P.B. Acharya formally inaugurated India`s first bamboo toilets here on Wednesday. The inauguration took place at the Nagaland Bamboo Resource Centre in Dimapur as part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (clean india Mission). The two prototype bamboo toilets inaugurated by Acharya are an outcome of a five-day training on “bamboo toilets for private use and for the community” jointly organised by Nagaland Bamboo Development Agency (NBDA) and South Asia...

-The Hindu Chennai had the highest proportion of ‘severe’ days based on AQI Official air quality data for the first half of this year shows that while Delhi does indeed face high levels of air pollution, Kanpur, Varanasi and Chennai are worse off. Averaging across the ten pollution monitoring stations in the city, a little over a quarter of the days from January to June this year in Delhi had an Air Quality...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Manik Garg, second-year commerce student at Shri Ram College of Commerce, knows nearly as much about cattle and dairy-farming as he does about business. He knows, for instance, that there are three types of feed ("Green fodder, hay and high-nutrition feed"), that a high-yielding animal (delivering at least 15 litres of milk per day) costs Rs 60,000—70,000 and that some pedigreed bovines need air-conditioned rooms. He,...

-Reuters NEW DELHI: A leading global charity has frozen $4 million in funding to India, squeezing aid to the poor, after a clampdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on donors deemed to be meddling in domestic politics that has raised concern in Washington. The government restrictions on the US-based Ford Foundation relate to a $250,000 grant to a vocal Modi critic, but a top official at the charity said the fallout has...