-Down to Earth Several thousand hectares of crops stand destroyed Even as a team of experts gears up to study the situation of droughts in Maharashtra, heavy unseasonal rains and hailstorms have damaged an estimated 88,000 hectares of standing crops and orchards in the last few days. Nashik, Jalgaon, Dhule, Nandurbar and Sangli are the worst-affected districts. In Nashik, 38,000 hectares of grape crops have been completely damaged. Subhash Arve, vice president of...

-Livemint The Forest Rights Act, 2006 has been impactful but faces new threats The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, commonly known as the forest rights Act, was passed by Parliament in December 2006. It was the third milestone in the rights-based development decade of 2004-14, coming after the Right to Information Act enacted in June 2005 and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-Business Standard Domestic regulators need to be stricter about quality violations to protect both Indian pharma exports as well as the country's image Even as major Indian drug companies continue to make news for impurities in the medicines they make and faulty - or if the USFDA is to be believed, falsified - data that many generate after testing of samples show quality problem, it seems strange that domestic authorities are silent...

-The Telegraph Regulators in several European countries are suspending marketing approval for 25 generic drugs because of concerns over the quality of data from human studies conducted by an Indian contract research company, a French medical safety agency said on Friday. Drug regulators in Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg have decided to suspend the marketing authorisation for the generic drugs after they discovered "irregularities" in documents relating to human studies conducted by...

-Outlook It has taken 16 months, 400 interviews and over Rs 30 lakh for the ‘Death Penalty Research Project' to see the light of day. It has taken 16 months, 400 interviews and over Rs 30 lakh for the ‘Death Penalty Research Project' to see the light of day. Project head Anup Surendranath, an assistant professor at National Law University, Delhi, speaks to Uttam Sengupta. Excerpts: * What triggered this project in...