-Economic and Political Weekly   The proposed Rangarajan method on measurement of poverty in India borrows elements from three earlier methods - those of Alagh, Lakdawala and Tendulkar. An important departure in the Rangarajan method is to compute the poverty line commodity basket by combining items from two fractile groups to address the relatively higher expenses for some essential non-food items. This, while being statistically plausible, poses a behavioural dilemma, as there...

-The Hindu Business Line Ahmedabad: As nearly 40,000 citizens signed a petition asking Tea companies to clean up chai, The Wagh Bakri Group, India's third largest Tea packager, on Thursday said it would support Greenpeace's attempts to eliminate pesticides from Tea cultivation in the country. Wagh Bakri has engaged with Greenpeace India whose report "Trouble Brewing" and highlighted pesticide residue in Tea samples recently. Hindustan Unilever Ltd and Girnar Tea have already announced...

-Press Information Bureau/ Ministry of Rural Development The Union Minister of Rural Development and Drinking Water and Sanitation Shri Nitin Gadkari said that Swachh Bharat Mission will be converted into a mass movement to make India an open defecation free country in Five Years. Addressing a Joint Press conference with the Urban Development Minister Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu here this afternoon, Shri Gadkari said, one lakh thirty four thousand crore rupees...

-PTI Srinagar: When the floods wreaked havoc in Kashmir and plunged most parts of the Valley into darkness, few doctors at a lone maternity care hospital in Srinagar, lent a ray of light to people's lives by performing birth surgeries under candlelight. Doctors at the Lal Ded Hospital, whose ground floor was submerged by flood waters from Jhelum, performed six deliveries under the candlelight as the electricity supply to the hospital was...

-The Indian Express The Rajasthan government is planning two significant amendments to the Right to Education (RTE) Act: reintroducing exams in at least three classes from Class I to 8, and giving more weightage to "learning outcomes" than to physical infrastructure of schools while deciding on their recognition or registration. A senior Rajasthan government official told The Indian Express that during Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje's "sarkar apke dwar" programme, parents suggested that...