-Hindustan Times Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday pledged to roll out a monthly income guarantee scheme, if his party comes to Power at the Centre, to ensure India’s 20 per cent poorest families make at least Rs 12,000 every month. The scheme would cover 5 crore families and benefit nearly 25 crore people, said Gandhi after the Congress Working Committee cleared the plan that party president described as the “final...

-Business Standard Forest bureaucracy to get more policing Powers, including higher immunity to use firearms and override Forest Rights Act New Delhi: The Union government has proposed an overhaul of the Indian Forest Act, 1927 which the British rulers imposed to take over Indian forests, use them to produce timber, while curtailing and extinguishing rights of millions. But, in the draft law to replace the colonial-era act, the Union government has proposed...

-The Hindu Sabotaging the Forest Rights Act damages democracy Since 1980, through the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has “diverted for non-forest use” (bureaucratese for destroyed) over 1.5 million hectares of forest. How many Adivasis and forest-dwellers have been evicted by this ‘lawful’ forest destruction? Stripping these forests has yielded thousands of crores of rupees for corporations to which a bulk of these forestlands...

-News18.com Considering how governments have handed forests to destructive industries, why don't these wildlife-first organisations demand the eviction of the Forest Departments from forest lands? Imagine people who live in clearings inside an extensive dense forest, cultivating paddy, harvesting grass, bamboo, and mushrooms, and hunting the occasional deer. They stay awake at night, beating drums to tell their elephant brothers not to come for their hard-earned crop. Once the harvest is over,...

-Livemint.com India's economic Power has become a much-quoted metric ahead of Elections 2019. We separate three myths from reality Now that we are officially in election season, one can expect a slew of report cards on the performance, economic and otherwise, of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government. However, it’s not that easy to gauge economic performance anymore. Not only are many official numbers under a cloud, over the past couple...