-Newsclick.in Release of the draft during a Lockdown, which seeks to fundamentally changes India’s environmental regulations, shows BJP government’s utter disdain for public opinion. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) had released a Draft Notification on Environment Impact Assessment 2020 (EIA Notification 2020) on March 12, 2020, on the eve of the world’s largest nationwide Lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and had called for responses in the next...

-The Hindu "We don’t want anything from the government. We just want to be dropped home," says a migrant worker from Chhattisgarh. Mungeli is more than 700 km away from the Uttar Pradesh capital. Yet for desperate and hungry Lalaram and his family, the distance did not matter as they set out on foot on Thursday evening, with a few bicycles loaded with meagre possessions, heading home to Chhattisgarh. With Lalaram were his...

-The Indian Express Kanchi Kohli of the Centre for Policy Research said, "Environmental laws need to be strengthened and not relaxed as is the draft EIA. For instance, the gas leak that in Visakhapatnam today; while this is an accident, there will now have to be an investigation to see whether this was a lapse." After receiving numerous representations for extending the notice period of the draft Environment Impact Assessment notification 2020,...

-The Indian Express At the time of the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was the only relevant law specifying criminal liability for such incidents. A gas leak from LG Polymers factory situated on the outskirts of Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh killed at least 11 people on Thursday. The factory was to reopen Friday after the Lockdown, and the gas began leaking as workers were preparing to resume work. Please click here...

-Scroll.in The migrant exodus will undoubtedly hurt the economy. But that is no excuse for forced labour. The Indian government’s policies towards its vulnerable migrant worker population were already a mess. This week, Karnataka made it worse. The Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state decided to cancel trains that would allow working-class people from other states to return to their homes five weeks after a national Lockdown to combat Covid-19 left them stranded, often without...