-The Times of India Kolkata: Here's good news for the city where several pockets are contaminated with arsenic-affected water. The Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur has developed an ultra-low cost eco-friendly laterite based arsenic filter for providing safe drinking water. The innovation has won Sirshendu De, the head of chemical engineering department, the Innovation Award 2016 from the Indian Desalination Association (South Zone). "In India and Bangladesh, it is generally agreed that arsenic contamination...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...

-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...

-PTI More than 5.5 million people die prematurely each year due to air pollution with over half of those deaths occurring in China and India Washington: More than 5.5 million people die prematurely each year due to air pollution with over half of those deaths occurring in China and India, two of the world’s fastest-growing economies, according to a new research. According to scientists from the US, Canada, China and India, who...

-The Indian Express Will not halt research but not rushing through decision, says Javadekar. HELPING THE government buy peace with activists protesting against granting clearance to the first transgenic food crop in the country, the biotechnology regulator on Friday deferred a decision on allowing the cultivation of a genetically-modified (GM) hybrid mustard. The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), a body under the Environment Ministry that regulates the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs),...