-The Indian Express Niggling procedural hassles stymie efforts to modernise antiquated labour regulations.   As it completes one year in office, the NDA government seems to have finally bit the bullet and taken up the controversial Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, for amendments that would allow easier retrenchment and closure norms for firms with up to 300 workers though ensuring that the employees get higher compensation in return. The draft code on industrial relations has...

-The Hindu A study shows that Indians are not immune to health consequences of smoking and that smokers have a higher death rate than non-smokers. Recently, a parliamentary committee declined to extend the size of health warnings on cigarette packets due to lack of independent evidence on the health impacts of smoking on the Indian population. A longitudinal study conducted by the National Council of Applied Economics (NCAER) and University of Maryland shows that in...

-Livemint.com Despite improvements over the past few years, accessing clean water is a big challenge in rural India Women in Indian villages have borne the brunt of water scarcity for a long time. Tales of young women missing out on school or college to fetch water for their families are common across the Indian countryside even today. But then there are extreme examples, such as the village of Denganmal, 150 kilometres...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes. The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while...

-Hindustan Times They are called cafeteria sessions. At lunch time, Greenpeace fund-raisers wander among hundreds, sometimes thousands, of young men and women packing the cafeterias of Indian companies. It’s not a good idea to name these companies. Greenpeace’s activities include forest preservation, renewable-energy promotion and fighting on behalf of local communities. These appear to be popular causes among young professionals. Donations of Rs 300 to Rs 500 constitute about 80% of...