-Hindustan Times In all the heat being generated by the government’s amendments to the land acquisition law, the tribals are being left out in the cold. In his Mann Ki Baat broadcast Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed himself to “My dear farmer brothers and sisters”. He did not include the tribals. Perhaps farmers are in the spotlight because the tragedy of farmers’ suicides gives the opposition an emotive issue to raise in...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The summer monsoon weakened across large swathes of India in the past century, scientists said today, linking the reductions in rainfall to hitherto-unobserved trends that they say portend a dangerous drying of the Indian subcontinent. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said they had identified a significant weakening trend in summer rainfall between 1901 and 1912 over central and northern India, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basins and...

The fourteenth Public Accounts Committee (2014-15) report, submitted to the 16th Lok Sabha in April this year, has found that despite various interim orders issued by the Supreme Court from time to time (based on a writ petition that was filed by People’s Union for Civil Liberties in April, 2001), the Government of India has failed to universalize the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. This means India has to...

-IndiaSpend.org As many as 298 of 542 Lok Sabha members have not spent a single rupee of the annual Rs 5 crore that is set aside for constituency development A year after they took office, 298 of 542 members of the 16th Lok Sabha – India’s lower house of Parliament – have not spent a rupee from the Rs 5 crore that is set aside annually for them to develop their constituencies,...

-The Hindu The growth-at-all-cost mantra has left a vast majority of people impoverished. If the first year of the BJP government is any indication, its five-year stint may turn out to be the worst period for India’s environment and ecosystem-dependent people since the 1980s. This is saying a lot, given that none of the previous governments has been particularly sensitive to issues of fresh air and water, productive soil, healthy forests and grasslands....