-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A team of 40 IIT Delhi students has devised a way to fight air pollution - by replacing wood with cow dung "logs" during funerals. The "environment-friendly technique" also seeks to reduce deforestation by cutting down dependence on wood. "Arth, an initiative by Enactus IIT-D, targets replacing wood as a fuel at Delhi's crematoriums," said Faraz Mazhar, a member of the group. According to his teammate, Shalaka...

-The Times of India PATIALA: When smoke from burning paddy stubble was choking Delhi last year, one small village near Nabha in Punjab was doing its bit to keep the air clean. Not a straw was burnt in Kalar Majra, where 60 families farm about 700 acres. “The government chose our village as a model, and gave all the machinery needed to manage the crop residue,” says Bir Dalvinder Singh, a Kalar...

-Livemint.com The production of ‘mahua’ is finally entering the formal economy as new initiatives seek to upscale this indigenous drink, selling it across the country and even the globe It is a cloudy morning in Nangur village in Bastar district, Chattisgarh. It is a settlement of a little over 400 families, considered fairly large in these parts. We make a bumpy journey down a narrow, unpaved road intermittently shaded by sargi (sal)...

-TheWire.in In villages where the number of households as per the baseline survey is less than the actual households, the toilet building exercise poses an allocation challenge: Who gets the limited number of toilets? Barabanki/ Meerut/ Lucknow/ Shamli: Usha Devi is 24, belongs to a so-called lower caste. She has five children, the eldest is seven-years-old and the youngest one month. Her husband works as a labourer at a brick kiln...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: All is not right with the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India. A recent rating of 123 countries with functional right to information laws saw the country slip to number six on the list. While it slipped by only a notch from last year, it is several rungs down the list from 2011, when the global RTI rating started. India was at number 2...