-Live Mint While natural disasters grab our attention, everyday events like illness drag most people into poverty  In a small town of Gujarat, I met Chandibai, a woman, about 50 years of age. Fifteen years previously, her husband, Gokalji, had owned a general-purpose shop in the town centre. The family also owned a house and some agricultural land. In 1989, Gokalji developed an illness that confined him to bed, sometimes at home...

-The Times of India Rs 4,439 crore has literally gone down the drain called the Yamuna. Delhi and Uttar Pradesh have told the Supreme Court that they have spent Rs 4,124 crore on making the river's water potable, but the Central Pollution Control Board's latest report shows that Yamuna's water still resembles that of a drain.  The New Delhi Municipal Committee and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi have spent an additional Rs...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: In a development that further establishes the poor state of the Ganga, an inter-ministerial group (IMG) at the Centre is all set to classify the holy river in the 'C' (poor) category. The categorization is likely to be done in view of a report submitted by IIT-Roorkee which found that in the coming days 84% of the water flow in the river will either be diverted...

-The Indian Express Chandigarh: Even as the Group of Ministers (GoM), led by Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, will meet on Tuesday to review once again the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill-2011, Haryana is hoping that it will not be made mandatory for the Congress-led states. Severely critical of the proposals, officers involved in the process of land acquisition in the state point out that the Bill is “retrograde” and...

-The Tribune India is governed by a written Constitution and any policy decision, programme by the Central or state government must be within the constitutional parameter of the Constitution. The State under our Constitution is mandated to protect the human rights. Any government policy, which seeks to shift this responsibility from the state to the private sector, would be, without anything more, unconstitutional and hence impermissible. The United Nations, since its inception, has...