-The Hindu The UPA government has been proactive in responding to demands by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) for a raise in natural gas prices, but has shown little urgency in implementing the Comptroller and Auditor General's (CAGs) recommendations made in 2009 on the audit of oil and gas contractors such as RIL. The CAG recommendation would have facilitated the intense scrutiny of the prices and profits made by the contractors. The Petroleum Ministry's...

-PTI Jamshedpur: Free Legal Aid Committee (FLAC), an NGO engaged in spreading awareness against superstition of daayan (witch), demanded a ban on Emraan Hashmi's film Ek Thi Daayan. Kannan Iyer's Ek Thi Daayan, a supernatural film, features Emraan Hashmir, Huma Qureshi, Konkona Sen Sharma and Kalki Koechlin. Prem Chand alias Premji of FLAC, said he had recently written a letter to President Pranab Mukherjee demanding immediate ban on the film as...

The ongoing droughts and water crises in Maharashtra and Gujarat point to the multiple conflicts the beleaguered and scarce resource of water is likely to spark in the coming years. India is today the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, but it is clear that how we extract, harvest, distribute and manage our most precious resource cannot proceed along usual lines. The unsustainable over-extraction is heralding a fall in the water-table and...

-The Hindu   Even after five decades of feminism and female participation in the productive economy, the problem of women falling off the organised workforce remains a global phenomenon Former Lehman Brothers Chief Financial Officer Erin Callan recently urged women not to work too hard at their professions. Her comments in The New York Times about the dangers of losing the work-life balance came on the eve of the publication of Facebook COO...

-The Hindu     Jagdalpur Jail Superintendent says that a psychiatrist asked her questions about "anger" The Chhattisgarh government has initiated an enquiry into the mental health of Adivasi teacher Soni Sori lodged in the Jagdalpur jail to ascertain whether she should be sent to the mental asylum in Agra, according to women's rights groups. A legal team visiting Ms. Sori on March 15 after she failed to appear for a hearing the previous day,...