-The Hindu Environmental experts and politicians raise concern over Centre’s proposal. Given the widespread destruction of rainforests and native biodiversity caused by oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, environmental experts and politicians are warning that the Centre’s move to promote their cultivation in India’s northeastern States and in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands could be disastrous. Other concerns include the impact on community ownership of tribal lands, as well as the fact that...

-TheWire.in We must change the parameters we use to judge the "Productivity" of parliament. My first few days in the Rajya Sabha were tumultuous enough to realise that classics like Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice, the bible of Westminster, would really have to be ‘tropicalised’ a lot to adjust to the gross realities of the world’s largest and beleaguered democracy. The small endoscopic view of parliament’s functioning also leads to the belief that...

-Scroll.in Caste and religious identity have to be explicitly accounted for if the high burden of chronic malnourishment in India is to be addressed. There are few more glaring holes in the Indian development story than child health and nutrition. India has one of the highest rates of child stunting in the world: more than a third of its children under five years are short enough for their age to be counted as...

-Down to Earth Solutions based on going back to nature do exist, but to make a tangible impact on climate change, they need to be executed at scale and with adequate support from both the developed and developing world Nature-based Solutions (NbS) is one of the key focus areas of the upcoming 26th Conference of Parties (CoP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Glasgow. ‘We’re part of...

-IndiaSpend.com Laws governing schools should be easy enough for students to make sense of them. As states prepare to reform education laws under the National Education Policy, our analysis shows that most states’ education laws are verbose, restrictive and incomprehensible even to college graduates New Delhi: On April 8, 2021, union education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal launched the 'Students' and Teachers' Holistic Advancement through Quality Education' (Sarthaq) plan as the first step toward...