-PTI LONDON: An Indian climate change activist who works with local communities and governments for environmental change has been awarded the Commonwealth youth award. Priti Rajagopalan, 23, received a 5,000-pound grant towards her work at a ceremony held at the Commonwealth secretariat headquarters in London, the Commonwealth said on October 19. "This award inspires me to move forward and to take a lot more people with me, with the same spirit, into the...

-The Hindustan Times Nilesh Singit, 43, completed his Master's degree in Literature from Mumbai university in 1993 and a course in information technology soon after, and thought he was ready for the job market. Responses from the initial telephonic interviews too sounded positive. Then he went for the face-to-face rounds. A cerebral palsy survivor, Singit was rejected by one company after another - for four years. Dejected, he decided to turn entrepreneur....

-The Hindustan Times Mumbai: Indian companies have acquired land more than nine times the size of Delhi on foreign shores, as cultivable land at home is lost to urbanisation, industry and infrastructure projects. Land Matrix, a global land monitoring initiative that tracks land dealings worldwide, placed India among the top 10 countries that have acquired large tracts of land abroad, primarily for agriculture, in Africa and Asia. The country ranks eighth,...

-The Hindu Denying basic amenities to residents of ‘unrecognised' slums is an affront to their dignity; resettling them fails to address their concerns and is unviable financially Since 2005, the Central government has given significant amounts of money to the States to improve conditions for the country's urban poor, first under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and more recently through the slow-moving Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY). Unfortunately, very few...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Nearly three of every four students shortlisted for the Indian Institutes of Technology this year come from two of the country's 29 school boards, an analysis of the results has shown. The results have confirmed a long-standing suspicion: distribution of students who made it to the elite tech schools is not uniform across the two national and 27 state boards. The analysis has shown that of the nearly...