-The Hindu Instead of opening a debate on the Gadgil panel's report on the Western Ghats, the government has chosen to sideline and replace it with another by an alternate group This is a challenging time in India's development history where a number of tenets of environmental governance are being questioned by the imperative of growth. Environmental governance in India is under assault, and is thus in need of both fresh thinking,...

-The Hindu     The mistaken notion that the 53 per cent of India's population ‘dependent on agriculture' are all ‘farmers' leads many to dismiss the massive farmers' suicides as trivial There are nearly 15 million farmers (‘Main' cultivators) fewer than there were in 1991. Over 7.7 million less since 2001, as the latest Census data show. On average, that's about 2,035 farmers losing ‘Main Cultivator' status every single day for the last 20...

-The Hindustan Times It now seems increasingly unlikely that Parliament will consider the National Food Security Bill during this budget session. In a land which for centuries suffered devastating famines, where chronic hunger continues to stalk more than 200 million people, and which is home to every third malnourished child on the planet, this would be one more sad betrayal of the country's indigent millions, a reminder of how little they...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...

-The Telegraph YOGAPUR (Patna): Chief minister Nitish Kumar wants "light" in every household but there is darkness right under his nose. Barely 30km off Patna, Yogapur's inhabitants - mostly Mahadalits, Dalits and backward classes whom Nitish has tried his best to empower - have never seen power (electricity) in their village. The chief minister has vowed not to seek votes in the 2015 elections if his power dream tripped. But, it seems, there...