-The Hindustan Times The Cabinet on Wednesday finally approved an ordinance to launch the ruling Congress's showpiece welfare legislation, the National Food Security Bill, after a four-year political roller-coaster ride. The decision on the ordinance was unanimous, food minister KV Thomas said, adding that it was being sent to the president for his approval. An ordinance allows laws to be enacted when Parliament is not in session, although it needs to be...

-The Telegraph North India is among a small number of regions scattered across the globe vulnerable to severe and multiple impacts of climate change, a study by an international team of researchers has predicted. The study, based on computer simulations of future climate scenarios, suggests that northern India may experience sharp drops in yields of key crops and severe ecosystem changes that may show up as altered landscapes. While earlier studies have explored...

-Governance Now A CAG report dated March 15, 2013 had found Uttarakhand sitting on a time bomb, with nearly zero disaster preparedness back in Sept 2012 when the nationwide performance audit was done. Will other states, marked equally poorly in the audit, sit up and smell the coffee? The massive disaster in Uttarakhand has brought to the fore not only the old debate of ecology versus development but also thrown up...

-Down to Earth About nine million women went out of the job market in the rural areas between 2009-10 and 2011-12, a grim facet of the employment crisis in the countryside The dismal trend in India's jobless growth story was reinforced when the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released the highlights of its 68th round of its surveys, conducted from July 2011 to June...

-Reuters India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance programme that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said. The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American...