-The Telegraph New Delhi: Successive Indian governments have ignored repeated alerts and done little to introduce laws to curb practices that could explain how lead could slip into noodles and other raw and processed food, analysts say. India introduced unleaded petrol in March 2000 but the governments since then have not moved enough to impose mandatory limits for lead in paints which remain a key source of environmental lead pollution in the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Biochemist Thuppil Venkatesh says he is not surprised by claims of food safety regulators in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi that they have detected lead, a potential toxin to humans, in Maggi noodles. For over a decade, Venkatesh, professor emeritus at St John's Medical College, Bangalore, has been trying to warn the country about what he says are dangerous levels of lead in the environment that may slip into...

-The Week Vagaries of the weather are not the only reason for Marathwada's agrarian crisis Three widows, two daughters and an overwhelming sense of grief occupy the house of the Palwes in Kekat Jalgaon in Paithan, Aurangabad. The house lost all its men there were three in the past three years. The Palwe widows, Yashoda, Chandrabhaga and Lakshmibai, and Yashoda's two daughters, Suman, 8, and Sarita, 6, live in a hut without...

-Indiaspend.org   A nationwide survey on youth attitudes reveals mindsets that haven't kept pace with the changing times on issues related to gender and society India is a political democracy, but India's society is not democratic. That has been a hypothesis offered by many social scientists. Now there is empirical proof - from India's hope for the future, its school and college students. * 65 per cent school...

-Financial Chronicle From the inner recesses of Chattisgarh to the upper crevices of Sikkim, a look at how MGNREGA initiatives are changing lives The large blackboard outside the police station reads like a rate list. There are different monetary awards for Naxalites' surrender with different weaponry, the highest, Rs 4.5 lakh, for surrender with a light machine gun, Rs 3 lakh with an AK 47, and only Rs 30,000 with a 12...