-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre is set to announce a scheme for providing free diagnostic tests, including several blood tests, x-rays and advanced CT scans, for those visiting public health facilities. Private service providers will be roped in wherever required. While the idea of providing free diagnostics has been hailed by all those aware of it, health economists and public health experts expressed concern over outsourcing the tests to...

-Hindustan Times Ludhiana: Like every year, the farmers in the district have started burning stubble despite ban on such a practice. The agricultural experts and officials have been appealing to the farmers to avoid this practice but the farmers seem to be least concerned about it. Stubble burning can be noticed round the clock at every rural pocket of the district. According to the experts, it not only depletes the soil health but...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Greenpeace India today claimed the Union home ministry had interpreted the environmental group's "unintentional clerical errors" as violations of foreign funding laws and portrayed its campaigns for clean air, water, and energy as anti-national activities. In a response to the ministry - which has suspended Greenpeace's access to foreign funds and frozen its domestic bank accounts - the NGO has claimed it neither violated the Foreign Contribution (Regulation)...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government today gave in to the Opposition and referred the bill for regulating real estate to a select committee for scrutiny. Urban development minister M. Venkaiah Naidu brought a motion for sending the bill to the committee, to be headed by BJP MP Anil Madhav Dave. The 21-member panel will have to hand in its report at the start of the monsoon session. The Opposition had demanded examination...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Despite MGNREGA’s rich possibilities, Kumar notes that the Maharashtra government has slashed allocations under it to Rs 800 crore in 2014-15. Even as it stares at unprecedented crop loss from back-to-back droughts followed by untimely rains/hailstorms, Maharashtra has seemingly given the short shrift to MGNREGA, which could have gone some way in mitigating the current crisis. And significantly, its potential has been least leveraged in Vidarbha, the region...