-The Hindu Challenges abound in this approach, which needs to be analysed in depth before a policy is announced The University Grants Commission (UGC) has recently announced that it will do away with the mandatory PhD qualification to teach in Central Universities (CUs) spread across the country. It purportedly addresses a shortage of qualified faculty in CUs. According to the Ministry of Education data, there were 10,000 teaching positions lying vacant in...

-Press release by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) dated 18 May 2022 Geneva, 18 May 2022 (WMO): Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere, with harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development and...

-The Tribune The prices of essential food items have increased by 50% in seven years, whereas the real wage rate has risen by 22%. These figures show that inflation has outsmarted the real income of the poor, making their lives miserable as the food basket constitutes a substantial proportion of the total expenditure on the poor. The net effect is that the poor earn less and take loans to maintain the...

-PTI/ Newsclick.in Air pollution -- both household and ambient -- was responsible for the greatest number of deaths at 6.67 million worldwide. New Delhi: India saw over 23.5 lakh premature deaths due to pollution of all types -- including 16.7 lakh fatalities caused by air pollution -- in 2019, the highest among all countries globally, according to a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal.   The majority of air pollution related...

-Newslaundry.com Journalism doesn’t pay their bills, they have little or no institutional support and rely on commissions from ‘finding ads’ for papers. In his final news report, Pawan Jaiswal visited Rampur Dhabahi village in Uttar Pradesh’s Mirzapur in August 2021, where he asked a young woman about her dreams. The woman, Pinki, had been the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary 13 years ago, on how corrective surgery for her cleft lip...