-The Hindu It is easy to enrol them in school, but difficult to retain them Bangalore: It is around noon and a noisy bunch of boys are playing lagori in a small colony nestling between tall buildings in Papareddy Palya near Nagarabhavi II Stage. Some distance away, 13-year-old Basalingamma, daughter of a migrant labourer from Raichur, is watching the boys, carrying her elder sister's six-month-old son on her hip. The colony has close...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: While India awoke to the sheer extent of mobile phone penetration a decade ago, web penetration's now making news, fuelled largely by easy internet access on smartphones. At 12 million, Mumbai has more internet users than any other city in the country, according to data released by the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). This has much to do with the population of a city...

-The Indian Express There is nothing on record to prove that the Muzaffarnagar riots were sparked off by a Hindu girl being molested by a Muslim boy, or a romantic relationship between two such individuals, but there is little doubt that the rhetoric of protecting "our women", our bahu-beti, from Muslim young men, fanned the swirling flames of violence. The bogey of "love jihad", which the imagination of the Hindu right...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Rising temperatures on account of checked climate change would lead longer warm spells, heat extremes by as much as one-fifth of South Asia's land mass, and a higher incidence of excess rainfall. These are no longer distant risks according to the World Bank. By 2040, unprecedented heat could affect more than 5% of South Asia's land mass. And if efforts to counter rising temperatures are not...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: An expected 2°C rise in the world's average temperatures in the next decades will make India's monsoon highly unpredictable and by 2040, the country will witness a sharp reduction in crop yields due to extreme heat, a report commissioned by the World Bank cautioned on Wednesday. It said shifting rain patterns will leave some areas under water and others without enough water for power generation, irrigation or,...