-The Hindu Says it is well protected from tsunami or other natural disasters The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project is well protected from tsunami or other natural disasters, the Centre submitted before the Madras High Court on Tuesday. It made the submission while the First Bench of Chief Justice M.Y. Eqbal and Justice T.S. Sivagnanam was hearing a batch of petitions seeking various reliefs, including a direction to the Union government and others to...

-The Hindu The following is an extract from the NCERT's political science (Class XII) textbook that has sparked a controversy due to a cartoon depicting the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965. (According to Yogendra Yadav, former chief adviser to the NCERT on the preparation of the textbook, a reading of the text accompanying the cartoon would show that the chapter was not aimed at denigrating the anti-Hindi agitation, but was actually a...

CHENNAI: Government officials in Tamil Nadu can now sit in their air-conditioned offices and keep tabs on clogged up water bodies and channels in remote villages using satellite technology. Criticized by many for corruption and inefficiency, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been given a scientific make-over in the state with GIS (geographic information system) mapping being used to organize the works as well as to...

-The Hindu The petition against the Ambedkar-Nehru cartoon, published in The Hindu (“Humour is by no means exempt from prejudice”, June 8, 2012), makes for sad reading. Sad, because it bears the signatures of some of our best scholars, universally admired for their rigorous scholarship, who nevertheless chose to sign a petition short on facts. The petition asks the NCERT's Textbooks Review Committee to “reconsider the Ambedkar cartoon (and possibly other such...

-The Business Standard The Western Ghats need local environmental governance What sets the report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, headed by Professor Madhav Gadgil, apart from most other reports delivered by such government-appointed committees is that it does not view environmental factors in isolation from development imperatives. Nevertheless, its recommendations pay careful attention to the need for protection and preservation of the biological wealth of one of the world’s hot...