-The Times of India The union health ministry's target of distributing 50 drugs free under the free essential drug scheme is so much lower than the hundreds of drugs being provided by states with a functioning free drugs scheme that it has left health officials in these states puzzled. After starting off by talking of distributing 348 drugs in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) during the tenure of Dr Harsh...

-GRISTMedia.com In the course of my work as part of a team set up to look into the socio-economic status of Adivasi communities, there were several things I learned about the Land Acquisition Act, 2013, and the amendments to it. Here are some important questions about land and the Act that we should be asking: * What is the State's relationship to land and its citizens? This a key question - and one...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Sections of wildlife biologists have questioned the methodology India has adopted for its tiger census, saying it does not yield results to accurately measure changes in numbers either within a particular region or across the country. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a non-government partner that was involved in the tiger estimation exercise, said the "double-sampling" approach the Union environment and forests ministry adopted was "not the best currently...

-Scidev.net   * Black carbon and ozone in the atmosphere may cause India's wheat and rice crops to decline * Black carbon interferes with radiation reaching the earth while ozone is toxic to plants * Crop yield decline from pollutants may not be as large as projected by model THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Atmospheric pollutants may impact India's major crops like wheat and rice more than temperature rise, says a new study based on a ‘regression model'...

The results of the District Level Household and Facility Survey-4 for the year 2012-13, commonly known as DLHS-4, are out and it shows that among the 18 states and 3 UTs, the percentage of moderate wasting for children below 5 years is highest among Maharashtra (i.e. 34.1%). Similarly, in case of severe wasting and moderate underweight, the situation is worst in Maharashtra as compared to the rest (Please check the...