-The Telegraph New Delhi: Greenpeace India today claimed the Union home ministry had interpreted the environmental group's "unintentional clerical errors" as violations of foreign funding laws and portrayed its campaigns for clean air, water, and energy as anti-national activities. In a response to the ministry - which has suspended Greenpeace's access to foreign funds and frozen its domestic bank accounts - the NGO has claimed it neither violated the Foreign Contribution (Regulation)...

-Hindustan Times Ludhiana: Like every year, the farmers in the district have started burning stubble despite ban on such a practice. The agricultural experts and officials have been appealing to the farmers to avoid this practice but the farmers seem to be least concerned about it. Stubble burning can be noticed round the clock at every rural pocket of the district. According to the experts, it not only depletes the soil health but...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government today gave in to the Opposition and referred the bill for regulating real estate to a select committee for scrutiny. Urban development minister M. Venkaiah Naidu brought a motion for sending the bill to the committee, to be headed by BJP MP Anil Madhav Dave. The 21-member panel will have to hand in its report at the start of the monsoon session. The Opposition had demanded examination...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Despite MGNREGA’s rich possibilities, Kumar notes that the Maharashtra government has slashed allocations under it to Rs 800 crore in 2014-15. Even as it stares at unprecedented crop loss from back-to-back droughts followed by untimely rains/hailstorms, Maharashtra has seemingly given the short shrift to MGNREGA, which could have gone some way in mitigating the current crisis. And significantly, its potential has been least leveraged in Vidarbha, the region...

-Business Standard R Nagaraj, professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), had disputed the Central Statistics Office (CSO) methodology on non-financial private corporate sector, which is a segment in the new GDP data. His criticism was mainly on the ground that CSO altered the methodology in 2015 from what was agreed on by a sub-committee, in which Nagaraj was a non-official member, in 2014. CSO gave a rejoinder...