-TheNewsMinute.com Experts say that the narrative that a country must choose between environment and development itself is wrong. Merely days after the fatal landslide in Kerala’s Pettimudi in Idukki district in August last year, the spotlight was back on the Gadgil report on the Western Ghats. The report, submitted to the government of India in 2011, had designated the Pettimudi region among the most sensitive ecological zones in the Western Ghats and...
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Education Ministry’s notification on virtual seminars unenforceable, say academics -Kallol Bhattacherjee and Priscilla Jebaraj
-The Hindu Permission required from MEA to hold them, and also for issues ‘related to India’s internal matters’ A new notification by the Ministry of Education that requires public funded institutions to seek permission from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) before organising virtual academic seminars is “unenforceable”, leading academics have said. An official of the Ministry of Education defended the order as a “simplified permission system” but there is little clarity...
More »False phone numbers, fake names: How Bihar Covid testing data got infected -Santosh Singh
-The Indian Express The Indian Express travels across Jamui, Sheikhpura and Patna districts and tracks down nearly 600 entries shown as tested to find glaring gaps between what’s on paper — and what’s on the ground. Jamui, Patna and Sheikhpura: Over three days last month, three Primary Health Centres (PHC) in Bihar’s Jamui district tested 588 residents for Covid — all were negative. The name, age and cell number of each person...
More »Behind hydel project washed away, a troubled trail to accident in 2011 -Jay Mazoomdaar
-The Indian Express “Imagine the odds of a single, dislodged boulder killing him while nobody standing around received a scratch. In hindsight, was it just a freak incident or an early warning? Today, so many are feared dead and everything has been washed away,” says Kolkata-based realtor Kamal Surana. On Independence Day in 2011, Rakesh Mehra, the owner of Ludhiana-based Rajit Paints Group, drove up to Chamoli in Uttarakhand to inaugurate the...
More »India’s farm crisis is of the middle peasant, not the chhota kisan -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators...
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