-PTI NEW DELHI: Various rights groups have urged the government to hold a public consultation on the proposed amendments to the Child Labour Bill, which they warned will end up legitimizing economic exploitation of children and rob them of their childhood. They have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking a public consultation on the amendments and called for the removal of the provision seeking to legitimise use of children under 14...

-Hindustan Times Hyderabad/ Bhubaneswar/ New Delhi: A blazing sun baked large parts of India on Friday with a searing heat wave claiming dozens of lives this summer in a budding El Nino year, while the weather office predicted worse days ahead. The oppressive conditions have killed at least 21 people in the southern state of Telangana as the meteorological department said the mercury would likely shoot up further and advised people to...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes. The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A network of 293 ground motion sensors located across northern, eastern and northeastern India lay crippled during Nepal's 7.9 magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks, handicapping researchers trying to assess how the quakes affected cities and towns in these regions. No one knows how many of the 293 sensors designed to measure ground acceleration during earthquakes were actually recording data during the weekend earthquakes because funding for maintenance of...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The number of workdays being provided under the rural job flagship scheme MGNREGA has registered a decline, Lok Sabha was informed today. Minister of State for Rural Development Sudarshan Bhagat, in a written reply to Lok Sabha, said "there has been a decline in the number of persondays created in 2014-15." "MGNREGA is a demand driven programme and the demand for work itself is influenced by various factors such as...