-Livemint.com With no significant spending increase to boost consumption or other major reform, the 2020 budget may lack the firepower to reignite the economy A growth slump, a precarious fiscal position and rising inflation: these are extraordinary times for the Indian economy. Yet in the 2020 Budget, these extraordinary times did not lead to the extraordinary measures so many economists were clamouring for. Like previous budgets under this government, the latest one...

-The New Indian Express NRC state coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma did not answer queries made through WhatsApp GUWAHATI: The Gauhati High Court has dismissed the writ petition of a woman, declared a “foreigner” by a foreigners’ tribunal, as she failed to establish her linkage with her father. While passing its order, a division bench of Justices Manojit Bhuyan and Parthivjyoti Saikia quoted from the judgement of a 2016 case between Md. Babul Islam...

-Down to Earth Nirmala Sitharaman's Budget has all the ingredients to deepen India’s farm crisis These are desperate times for India. Rural unemployment was at a 45-year-high while consumption expenditure of rural families fell 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18, according to a report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), which the government never released but got leaked to the media in November 2019. Between 2011-12 and 2015-16, the income of farmers...

-The Hindu Growing threat from loss of habitat, widespread presence of toxins, hunting and trapping, it says Chennai: Over a fifth of India’s bird diversity, ranging from the Short-toed Snake Eagle to the Sirkeer Malkoha, has suffered strong long-term declines over a 25-year period, while more recent annual trends point to a drastic 80% loss among several common birds, a new scientific report jointly released by 10 organisations said on Monday. The State...

-The Hindu Among this year’s Padma Shri awardees are a father and daughter who turned a barren wasteland into a riot of trees and crops Furrowed with deep gullies, its topsoil all but gone, this degraded patch of land near Odagaon in Odisha’s Nayagarh district was once a dense forest. Whenever nature tried to reclaim it, the little shoots would be nibbled away by goats and sheep. The villagers who owned the...