-The Hindu Business Line It has worked as a rural safety net. But the Centre has other budgetary priorities A decade after the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme came into force, the NDA government has come around to accepting its usefulness — and that, in a difficult agriculture year. Last February, the Prime Minister disparaged the programme for merely digging pits. But only a few days ago, the finance minister...

-The Times of India It's 8:00 am on a Sunday and outside Denzong Cinema in Gangtok's Lal Bazar, the otherwise languid atmosphere is punctured by grocers of two kinds. On one side of the cinema are those who sell vegetables, fruits and spices sourced from outside Sikkim, mostly from Siliguri, 115 km south in West Bengal. On the other side of the cinema, almost completing a triangle, are farmers from the...

-The Hindu The Health Ministry’s plan for a malaria-free India by 2030 is laudable, but grand pronouncements are meaningless as long as manipulated data distort our knowledge and bad governance impedes genuine attempts to fight the disease This month, the Health Ministry will unveil an ambitious new plan to eliminate malaria from the country by 2030. A malaria-free India certainly sounds like a dream, or maybe an early campaign promise: the disease...

-The Times of India New Delhi: Zainab, Sana, Sumaila, Saima, Saina and Alisha, if not attending tuition classes, while away the day in the narrow bylanes of Hazrat Khwaja Peer Dard Colony, a stone's throw from their school, Nigam Pratibha Vidyalaya on Turkman Road in Delhi. The children may be happy that they don't have to go to school, but their parents worry that the kids are missing out on nutritious...

-The Indian Express Incidentally, the DPCC report claimed that “trends” showed that levels of PM10 and PM2.5 in the city were “decreasing”. New Delhi: A senior scientist with the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) told the Delhi High Court Thursday that pollution levels in the city will never come down to “safe limits” because of its “geographical disadvantage”. Dr M P George of the DPCC told the bench of Justices Badar Durrez...