-Down to Earth Bihar needs to strengthen and enhance capacities of Gram Panchayats to realise the gains of a decentralised planning Imagine yourself living for ages in a remote village inside a dense forest in the 21st century. Basic amenities such as proper roads, safe drinking water, healthcare and education facilities are missing.  The nearest primary school and health centre is located at a distance of seven kilometres. You have to trek through...

-The Telegraph With a per capita income at a whopping $2554, poverty is down; exports are up and GDP is fueled by both agriculture and manufacturing; but the downside is a growing nexus between politics and business There is justifiable pride all around at Bangladesh’s remarkable performance in both the economic and social development dimensions. “Pakistan and India don’t matter. We have done better than both!” The figures speak for themselves. The renowned...

-Down to Earth Jammu and Kashmir has lost very dense forests, while the North East is top in terms of total forest area loss There has been an increase in forest loss in India’s mountainous states along its Himalayan frontier, which are already in the throes of climate change, according to the latest report by the Forest Survey of India (FSI). India’s State of Forest Report is a biennial publication. The report for...

-The Hindu India records 2,59,291 new cases on Thursday Like every wave in the past, cases fuelled by the Omicron variant of COVID-19 have initially spread only in the urban areas. However, many rural and semi-rural places recorded a sharp spike in infections in the past week. At the start of this year, 50% of the cases were from urban centres such as Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. However, the share reduced to...

-TheWire.in In an interview with Karan Thapar, the epidemiologist said the reason the WHO doesn’t trust India’s COVID-19 death count is because the undercounting is substantially greater than in other countries. Prabhat Jha, one of the world’s most highly regarded epidemiologists, has said that the World Health Organisation (WHO) does not trust India’s COVID-19 death figures and, therefore, when it made its first estimate of global deaths, it did not include India’s...