-Hindustan Times The murder of a woman in Alwar points to India’s most shockingly under-reported story on why nearly 200 lakh women have quit jobs All Usha Devi wanted was to give her kids a good education. The wife of a construction worker knew that her husband’s income was not enough to educate her children, Tanuja, 15, and Dheeraj, 10, and, so, she took a job at a plastic factory. Not everyone was...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The first nationwide survey for drug-resistant tuberculosis has found nearly 3 per cent of first-time patients and 12 per cent of those previously treated infected with multi-drug-resistant TB, lowering uncertainty over the scale of the problem. The survey by the Union health ministry has also revealed wide variations in state-level patterns of drug-resistant TB, indicating that the national-level estimates might mask local epidemics that need to be addressed...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Aadhaar is blind to the purpose of authentication as it only establishes identity and nothing more, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey told the Supreme Court on Thursday, countering apprehensions that Aadhaar would result in “virtual surveillance” of citizens. In the course of a Power-Point presentation, Pandey said Aadhaar was a tool to establish identity and was not an aggregator of...

-Scroll.in The existing policy bans commercial activity in natural forests to protect forest dwellers. The new draft policy is up for public comments till April 14. The Union government has drafted a new National Forest Policy. If approved, the policy will allow the corporate sector to grow, harvest and sell trees on government-owned forest lands. So far, this is explicitly banned under the existing National Forest Policy, which was laid down...

-Livemint.com The only way to solve the farmers’ problem is to make entry to other sectors attractive by creating employment opportunities, and to make it easy to exit farming Farmers have a bad romance with the Indian polity. On the one hand, India loves, even worships, these farmers. On the other, Indian policymakers create the most impossible regulatory environment for the agricultural sector, trapping farmers in a low-income, low-productivity occupation. The latest...