-Scroll.in Notified in September, the rules will facilitate the development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dump After ignoring repeated directions from the Supreme Court to notify stricter rules to protect the country’s wetlands, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has gone and done just the opposite. On September 26, it published the Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017 – replacing the older rules dating back to...

-TheWire.in Diane Coffey and Dean Spears’ Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste is a path breaking addition to the literature on child malnutrition and development policy in India. The history of global health has been marked with a dramatic turnaround starting from around the mid to late 19th century. This period witnessed an unprecedented decline in death rate and a steady increase in the life expectancy...

-Livemint.com The river interlinking project will adversely affect land, forests, biodiversity, rivers and the livelihood of millions of people Interlinking of rivers is a very expensive proposal. It has huge adverse environmental impacts on land, forests, biodiversity, rivers and the livelihood of millions of people. It is a socially disruptive proposition. It will not only add to climate change impact (destruction of forests means destruction of carbon sinks, and reservoirs in tropical...

-The Times of India PALANPUR: Tragedy struck Khariya village in Gujarat's Banaskantha on Wednesday when 18 bodies — all close relatives — were recovered from a river bank, taking the flood related death toll since the beginning of monsoon to 119. The toll may go up as rescue operations are on. Villagers in Khariya watched in disbelief as the bodies were found one after another from the slush and placed in a...

-The Indian Express The study compared pre-monsoon water level data for 1,487 wells selected from across Maharashtra with the decadal mean between 2006-2015. This study indicated a decline in ground water levels in 70 per cent of the wells monitored. Mumbai: The low intensity of rains across the state, especially in cities like Mumbai, may have led to consternation but Maharashtra faces a larger problem in the long run due to a...