-The Hindustan Times The entire framework for monitoring environmental compliance is being dismantled systematically. This is a process that actually began with the UPA government, which replaced the feisty environment minister Jairam Ramesh with the more pliant Jayanthi Natarajan. With industry lobbies still crying wolf, she too made way for Veerappa Moily, the petroleum and natural gas minister, without the UPA seeing anything contradictory in someone holding both those responsibilities. In just a month,...

-The Business Standard Government is diluting green regulations, not reforming them In his speech from the Red Fort on Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said many sensible things about Indian manufacturing. It is certainly true that it must be a focus area for his government. As a proportion of India's gross domestic product (GDP), the share of Indian manufacturing peaked in 1996-97, at the pitifully low percentage of a little over...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's poorest and socially underprivileged people seem to have benefited the least from a set of government programmes launched over the past decade to reduce personal expenses on health care, research suggests. A team of health economists has found that the financial burden of health care on India's poorest 20 per cent, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslims has outpaced that on the richest 20 per cent and...

-PTI Coimbatore: Bringing small millets into mainstream diet is the challenge ahead and stakeholders meeting can be held once in three months to ensure its increased production and consumption, an officials of DHAN Foundation, said today. Focusing on consumption, cultivation, conservation and commerzialisation of small millets was crucial for having an intergrated approach in promoting them, M P Vasimalai, Executive Director of the foundation, said while addressing a National Consultative Workshop on...

-The Telegarph New Delhi: India has asked its citizens to defer non-essential travel to four West African nations struck by outbreaks of the Ebola virus and has alerted its health surveillance system to track travellers arriving from these countries for up to four weeks. Health minister Harsh Vardhan today said people should defer "non-essential travel" to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria that have cumulatively reported 1,603 Ebola patients, including 887 deaths. The...