-The Business Standard The ministry has eased coal production expansion norms "to quickly ramp up coal production for enhancing power generation" The Centre has set up a high-level committee to review various environmental laws. According to an environment ministry note, the panel, headed by former CABinet secretary T S R Subramanian, will review the Environment Protection Act of 1986, Forest Conservation Act of 1980, Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, Water Act of 1974...

-The Hindu Trap crops are grown to attract insects or other organisms to protect main crops from pest attack. Protection may be achieved either by preventing the pests from reaching the crop or by concentrating them in certain parts of the field where they can be destroyed. The principle of trap cropping rests on the fact that virtually all pests show a distinct preference to a certain crop stage. Farmers are being...

-The Business Standard Flagship e-governance project needs more homework The just-approved Digital India project, seeking to deliver all government services electronically in less than four years, has already thrown up object lessons whose implications go far beyond the future of the project itself. The project is vital for the future well-being of every Indian. The information technology industry will be given a boost, too. And it has the benefit of building on...

-The Goan In the second decade of the 15th century, after the French ruler Charles VI was succeeded by his son bearing his name, a phrase was coined: "The king is dead, long live the king". The phrase literally meant that the transfer of sovereignty occurs simultaneously from the moment of death of an earlier monarch. Over the years, the phrase came to signify superficial change: the more things change,...

-The Business Standard The Planning Commission needs to be replaced by institutions prescribed under the Constitution for the functions it usurped The Planning Commission was a powerful centre of extra-constitutional authority, but not because the Constitution overlooked the need for the roles that it played. The prescription of fiscal flows from Centre to states was assigned under Article 280 to Finance Commissions, set up every five years with what by convention...