-The Economic Times 'Bharat' is not going to be 'swachh' anytime soon despite the ambitious programme launched by the Narendra Modi government to clean the country. Next year India will send its second rocket to the Moon but when it comes to pollution, India is alarmingly filthy even by the standards of poor countries, writes The Economist magazine. India's air and water are heavily polluted causing not only a large number of...

-The Hindu Study says 26% of global premature death and disease burden by air pollution occurs in India India, with 18% of the world’s population, has a disproportionately high 26% of the global premature deaths and disease burden due to air pollution. Moreover, one in eight deaths in India was attributable to air pollution in India in 2017, making it a leading risk factor for death. This is according to the first comprehensive...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Exhorting the government to take necessary steps to formulate statistics pertaining to construction workers, domestic workers and women workers in the unorganised sector, the Central Information Commission has recommended the ministry of labour and employment carry out the exercise in line with provisions meant to promote “transparency, accountability and conformity” in the RTI Act. Then Information Commissioner, M Sridhar Acharyulu (who retired on November 21), in...

-The Telegraph After debunking faith in numbers, assertions by powerful and charismatic leaders can be projected as the truth The comment on the weaponisation of economics by the former chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, is a telling indictment of the way political interests trump such other considerations as veracity and transparency. The latest round of revisions in the rate of growth of gross domestic product is a perfect example of the use...

-The Indian Express After number fell from 2003 to 2014, UN data find trend reversed. Yet since 2014, global farm commodity prices have been falling. Here is why that has not stopped the rise in the number of hungry people A decade-long phenomenon of the number of undernourished people in the world falling between 2003 and 2014, both in absolute terms (from 961.5 million to 783.7 million) and relative to total...