-The Times of India CHENNAI: Corporation of Chennai insists that private hospitals reserve 10 per cent of their beds for admission of poor patients free of cost according to the guidelines of the Nursing Homes Regulatory Act. It also mandates that private hospitals submit periodical monthly reports to the health officer to register a nursing home and hospital with beds in the city. Of the 700 private hospitals in Chennai, few, if...

-The Hindu District Mineral Foundations were set up to protect the interests of Adivasi communities who have borne the costs of mining. But they are flawed in their current form Through 2011-13, dogged investigators from the Justice M. B. Shah Commission on illegal mining toured the rust-red villages, forests and rivers of northern Odisha, and trawled through reams of official records including from the environment, minerals, railways, and revenue departments. They met...

-Livemint.com The petitioners have pinned their hopes on a clause in the 2013 land law that the government is now planning to amend   Punjabhai Modhwadia, 42, isn’t giving up his land. Not without a fight. Sitting under a banyan tree overlooking fields of cotton, jowar and groundnut, next to what Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani called one of the biggest construction sites in the world, the Jamnagar farmer describes why...

-Frontline Changing the way you count changes the count. THE total number of farmer suicides in the country since 1995 crossed the 3,00,000-mark in 2014. However, the 2014 data are not comparable with 19 earlier years of farm suicide data. This is because of major changes in the methodology of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). With the new parameters, the number of farmer suicides in 2014 falls to 5,650. That is...

-The Indian Express We can add millions of hectares to irrigated land without building a single new dam. We just need to adopt a different method of managing the water already stored in them. One of the drivers of India’s irrigation sector has been the construction of large dams on our rivers, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously described as “the temples of modern India”. While these dams have helped increase India’s irrigated...