-Business Standard Amendments will bar whistleblowers from disclosing info which govt and its agencies are exempted from providing under RTI Act The NDA government has proposed to substantially reduce the kind of information the whistle-blowers will be able to disclose under the Whistleblowers Protection Act, 2011. The government has tabled an amendment bill in the Lok Sabha that reduces the mandate of the law considerably. If the amendment is passed, the whistle-blower would no...

-Down to Earth Over the years, research has shown there is an association between El Nino and deficient rainfall in India According to a few recent weather forecasts, the world is headed for an El Nino event. The recent data shown by Australian Bureau of Meteorology shows that the tropical Pacific has continued to warm in the past week and the sea surface temperatures now exceed El Niño thresholds and trade winds...

-PTI Despite India's declining child sex ratio, as many as 30 states and union territories have not convicted even a single person for pre-conception and pre-natal diagnostic between 2011 and 2013, raising concerns about the poor implementation of the PCPNDT Act. Despite India's declining child sex ratio, as many as 30 states and union territories have not convicted even a single person for pre-conception and pre-natal diagnostic between 2011 and 2013,...

-Hindustan Times Sheopur: The tribals of 106 villages in Madhya Pradesh have either demolished government made toilets or are using them as storerooms, say government officials, admitting that one of the reasons behind this was faulty design. This happened just 450 kilometres from Bhopal in Sheopur district villages where the government had built about 13,000 roofless, waterless and three-walled structures’ in the name of toilets in 2008-09 under its rural sanitation scheme. Many...

-The Times of India RAIPUR: Adopting grafting method and other technology, a Bastar-based farmer has overcome the tribal region's airborne disease bacterial wilt, which hampered the cultivation of brinjal vegetable in this region of Chhattisgarh. Progressive farmer Ramesh Chawda now gets an yield of 1,25,000kg of brinjal from each acre of his 2.5 acres land. To make brinjal cultivation a success in this terrain, he adopted the horticulture technique of grafting the...