-TheWire.in Nearly two months after the Kumbh Mela ended, tannery owners are still waiting for the go ahead to reopen. Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh): In Kanpur’s Jajmau cluster, 225 tanneries are still closed, even though the Maha Kumbh Mela ended on March 4. While the discharge created by the tanneries is being cited as the official reason, tannery owners say the state’s urban development and environment ministries, as well as the chief minister’s...

-TheWire.in Mid-day meal cooks in Bihar – mostly women from Dalit and Adivasi communities – are subject to the worst kind of institutional gender discrimination. Patna/Jehanabad/Bhojpur (Bihar): On February 11, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi served the third billionth Akshay Patra mid-day meal in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, he said that his “government has given special focus on the nutrition of the children because a healthy childhood is the foundation of New India”. “Modiji...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday took less than a minute to seek the Election Commission’s response to a joint petition filed by leaders of 21 non-NDA political parties pleading for mandatory counting of VVPAT paper slips in at least 50% of EVMs in each assembly segment in the Lok Sabha elections even though it may delay declaration of results. Senior advocate AM Singhvi, who played a...

-Hindustan Times Acting chairman PC Mohanan and external member J Meenakshi both had terms lasting until June 20 next year, according to the website of the National Statistical Commission. Mohanan was also an external member. With their departures, the commission now has no external members. Upset over the way the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was perceived to have sidelined them and undermined their authority, the acting chairman and an external member...

-TheWire.in P.C. Mohanan and J.V. Meenakshi – the only two non-government members of the commission – tendered their resignations because of the body's ineffectiveness. New Delhi: The only two non-government members of India’s National Statistical Commission have resigned, leaving just chief statistician Pravin Srivastava and NITI Aayog’s Amitabh Kant at the head of a body that is the apex advisory organisation for all of the country’s core statistical activities. According to sources with...