-The Indian Express New Delhi: For two months, residents of NCERT Colony kept approaching authorities with complaints of contaminated water, but no action was taken. The authorities took notice only after two residents died and 70 fell ill. On Sunday, four-year-old Sanjana was declared dead at Safdarjung Hospital. Since then, several residents have fallen ill. The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) and the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) are, meanwhile, blaming each other for the contaminated water. Residents claimed...

-PTI HYDERABAD: An advanced facility to help speed up development and selection of crop varieties, which are tolerant to drought, flood and heat in a more precise way, is being set up at the Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) here. The facility -- Phenomics platform -- is being set up at an estimated cost of Rs 10 crore under the National Initiative on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) to study climate...

-The Indian Express Why the proposed national minimum wage is the wrong answer to questions of unemployment and poverty The recent national labour conference - a trade union love fest with little real employer participation - demanded a national minimum wage. The trade union demand is a predictable positioning of narrow self-interest as national interest but the government's acceptance of their demand is unfair, delusional and economically stupid. Unfair, because it pampers a...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: Union tourism secretary Pervez Dewan has asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to remove a sentence in a Class X geography textbook that reads tourism has not been encouraged in the Northeast "for strategic reasons". For Kavya Barnadhya Hazarika, a Class XI student of Maharishi Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School here, it's a lesson learnt that persistence pays. Kavya had written to both President Pranab...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...