-The Telegraph New Delhi: One in five television programmes in India display tobacco, but only 5 per cent of programmes with tobacco scenes show the mandatory anti-tobacco health spots at the start and middle, a survey conducted for the government has suggested. The survey found tobacco depicted in 22 per cent of programmes in a sample based on nine hours of programming each of 45 of India's 446 TV channels. But it...

-Caravan Magazine Arun Kumar is an eminent economist who has been studying the black economy in India for close to four decades. His 1999 book The Black Economy in India is among the foremost accounts of the black-money problem in the country. In Understanding the Black Economy and Black Money in India: An Enquiry into Causes, Consequences and Remedies, released in February 2017, Kumar discusses the misconceptions around black money, the...

-The Hindu The interaction between people and land is as old as human evolution. When early hunter-gatherers started to settle down in the Neolithic transition and practise agriculture, they began to change their relationship with land in a major way. Starting with the Holocene, approximately 11,500 years ago, many plants were domesticated for agriculture. These and the associated social and technological changes led to dense human settlements that then paved the...

-Scroll.in A farmer describes her efforts to preserve 12 breeds of draught as well milch indigenous cattle. On Monday, the so-far peaceful protests against jallikattu on Chennai’s Marina Beach turned violent as the police sought to clear agitators from what had become ground zero of the movement against the Supreme Court ban on the bull-taming sport. Though an ordinance cleared on Saturday allowed the sport to take place this Pongal, the controversy...

-The Hindu The ongoing repercussions of the government’s decision to demonetise high-value currency notes are being felt in particular by cash-intensive sectors such as the microfinance industry, according to microfinance company Satin Creditcare. “It’s been a pretty tough time (post demonetisation),” H.P. Singh, chairman and managing director of Satin Creditcare, said in an interview. “The cash supply position has been very bad in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab… in both...