-PTI Cooperative society employing French technology to cater 2,000 litres of Sulabh Jal to over 300 families a day Gaighata (West Bengal): Once forced to drink arsenic-contaminated ground water, residents of a remote hamlet in West Bengal near the India-Bangladesh border are now purifying water from ponds and selling packaged safe drinking water to neighbouring villages. Using a new innovative technology from France, village co-operative society Madhusudankati Samabay Krishi Unnayan Samity has constructed...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Vegetables are the noble folk of food world, loved equally by doctors and grandmothers. Vegetarians live off them and meat-eaters are told to live off them. But in Delhi, under every crunchy leaf of radish or the shiny brinjal hide dangerous amounts of pesticides that can slowly kill, shows a new study by JNU. Pritha Chatterjee and Aniruddha Ghosal report how growers, consumers and the authorities may...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...

-Pune Mirror Child rights activists demand that Centre amends Child Labour Act to ban children from working in the field Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL) submitted a charter of demands to Pune MP Anil Shirole to be raised in Parliament when the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Bill, 2014, comes up for discussion during the ongoing session. And, one of CACL's principal demands - perhaps the most important one -...

-AP American scientist Joshua Apte travels in an autorickshaw to present alarming findings for anyone who spends time on or near the roads in this city of 25 million. The autorickshaw lurched through New Delhi's commuter-clogged streets with an American scientist and several air pollution monitors in the back seat. Car horns blared. A scrappy scooter buzzed by belching black smoke from its tailpipe. One of the monitors spiked. Joshua Apte has alarming...