The World Wildlife Fund has warned that days are numbered for much of the sensitive Sunderbans eco-system and in 60 years vast tracts of the rare mangrove forests, home to the Bengal tiger, will be inundated by the rising sea. The study, focussed on Sunderbans in Bangladesh, says the sea was rising more swiftly than anticipated by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and would rise 11.2 inches...

The Left parties would raise a demand to scrap the “archaic” Land Acquisition Act, 1884, as it facilitated land acquisition by big corporates, who took advantage of the acute distress of farmers, Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat said here on Sunday. “Why are they [the Centre] delaying the scrapping of the Act?” she said. “There is utter hypocrisy in land reforms and distribution in the country.”...

When the government passed the Right to Information (RTI) Act in 2005, it should have added a statutory warning: exercising this right may be extremely injurious to health. Shashidhar Mishra of Begusarai, who was murdered by unknown assailants last Sunday, is the second RTI activist to be killed in a month for perhaps knowing too much. Attacks on RTI activists have emerged as a disturbing trend of late, especially in...

In its election manifesto for the 2009 general elections, Congress had promised that it would ensure that allocations made under the Special Components Plan (SCP) for scheduled castes and the Tribal Sub-Plan for scheduled tribes are in accordance with their proportion in the total population. These two crucial schemes ensure that a proportion of all plan spending has to go towards the most marginalized and deprived sections of Indian society...

Institutions will need to protect not just female employees but even women visiting office premises from sexual harassment under new, last-minute changes to India’s proposed law against sex pests at the workplace. The changes proposed by the women and child development ministry cover victims, not working, where they face sexual harassment from an employee, protecting girls visiting their parents’ offices or women atheletes training at sports camps. The law ministry...