-The Hindu Initiatives by India discussed New Delhi: The United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Change, Luis Alfonso de Alba, met Union Environment and Forests Minister Prakash Javadekar and discussed India’s initiatives to meet its climate commitments. Ahead of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in September, Mr. de Alba, appointed by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as his climate envoy, is visiting several countries and urging leaders and businessmen to do...

-TheWire.in An independent analysis of 12 Mohalla clinics in Delhi to verify the claims of the government and opposition. Delhi’s Mohalla Clinics created quite a stir when the first one was opened in Peeragarhi in 2015. During the Aam Aadmi Party’s first year in office, the clinics were started to take diagnostics and treatment of simple ailments to people’s doorstep and reduce the footfall in tertiary care hospitals. Mohalla Clinics have been...

-Hindustan Times Since Independence, waves of forest encroachments have been regularised on one pretext or another, and this unfortunate trend seems to be continuing. With a recent United Nations report warning that one million species of plants and animals are poised on the BRInk of extinction, we need to take all forest destruction very seriously The Forest Rights Act (FRA) was originally meant to redress historical injustice to genuine forest dwellers by...

-The Hindu Opposition accuses the government of trying to dilute the effectiveness of the law New Delhi: The Lok Sabha on Monday passed the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2019 three days after it was introduced. It seeks to amend the landmark transparency law and BRIng in changes involving the salaries and tenures of Information Commissioners (ICs) at the States and Centre. As per the amendment ICs — who currently have five-year tenures...

-Odisha Economy Discussion Series-2, April 2019, Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies, Bhubaneswar Purpose – The recently launched KALIA scheme of the Government of Odisha is a massive direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme aimed at improving the condition of around three million farm households along with that of landless cultivators, sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, and vulnerable households. However, evaluations of the impacts of the scheme are likely to face difficulties in the...