-The Telegraph New Delhi: Activists from across the country have urged the President to stop the submergence of 192 villages in the Narmada Valley in Madhya Pradesh for the Sardar Sarovar dam till the state government compensates and rehabilitates the 40,000 families that will be affected. Some of them met President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday evening under the banner of the National Alliance for People's Movements (NAPM) and submitted a memorandum along...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Heat trapped by tarred roads and dense clusters of buildings may have added nearly 2 degrees to temperatures in the world's most populated cities, including Calcutta, Delhi and Mumbai, over and above the effects of global warming, researchers said today. Their study, described as the first to quantify the combined impacts of global warming and the "urban heat island effect", suggests that the overheated cities will face double...

-TheWire.in At Axis Bank and Yes Bank, it appears that a single auditor of a member firm of Ernst and Young has overlooked gross NPAs of a staggering Rs 13,655 crore. Recently, Axis Bank and Yes Bank jolted the Indian banking community while releasing their annual results. Both banks disclosed a staggeringly large divergence between the banks’ audited accounts and the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI)  findings regarding bad loans on the...

-The Hindu Liberalisation has eroded the institutional capacity to train young people who might pursue liberal values The other day, a student asked me what exactly the word ‘liberal’ mean. She wanted to know whether ‘liberalisation’ promotes ‘liberal’ values. She had noticed that institutions of higher education, which are supposed to promote liberal values, were finding it difficult to resist ideological and commercial pressures triggered by the process of economic liberalisation. So,...

-Scroll.in Growing the traditional maize and soya bean crops is no longer economically viable. “The land is thirsty, the Korku is hungry,” goes the refrain of the Korku Adivasis in the Satpura forest in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district. An unrelenting drought since 2014 has parched the Korku farmland, driving a population of over 40,000 spread across 100-odd villages to desperation. In Khari village, for example, more than half the farmers have been forced...