-Mongabay.com * In three years, India’s environment ministry approved diversion of over 20,000 hectares of forest Land for developmental projects like mining, thermal power plants, irrigation, road and railway projects across India. * Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha together account for over 62 percent of the total forest Land diverted during this period. * Diversion of forests for non-forestry projects has always been a contentious issue in India especially in light of poor...

-Newsclick.in The former AMU Vice Chancellor is the brain behind Sir Syed National School, a successful modern school, totally funded by the Muslim community in Muzaffarnagar. PATNA: A retired Lieutenant General of the Indian Army and former Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Lt Gen (Retd) Zameer Uddin Shah, emits a missionary zeal when he talks about the need for “modern and secular” education for Muslim children, instead of “ghettoised” schools. “We have...

-Scroll.in The former Planning Commission member explains why the country needs to tread carefully on this idea. On January 1, when Indian news agency ANI asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the government’s plans to reduce agrarian distress, he said loan waivers do not work as a very small segment of farmers take loans from banks. “A majority of them take loans from money lenders,” said Modi. “When governments make such announcements,...

-The Hindu But shola forests have remained “relatively unchanged” Kochi: The new year heralds bad news for the high-altitude grassLands of the Western Ghats. Over four decades, the country lost almost one-fourth of these grassLands and exotic invasive trees are primarily to blame, find scientists. Though grassLand afforestation using pine, acacia and eucalyptus ceased in 1996, the exotics still invade these ecosystems, confirms a study published on January 2 in the international...

-Livemint.com This Uttar Pradesh village offers a microcosm of the broader change in Indian villages since independence Palanpur is a relatively unknown small village in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh. However, it has a special place in development economics because of a research project that has stretched over seven decades. Economists have conducted seven detailed surveys of Palanpur since the 1950s, a rare longitudinal database that shows how the village has changed...