-The Hindustan Times India has driven the truck of development - loaded with tar, bricks, glass, concrete...the works - right through its most treasured and fragile green spaces in the last decade. While major cities like Delhi and Mumbai sacrificed green cover for real estate, the country's finest wildlife corridors have been ceded to indiscriminate industrialisation. In the absence of a clear policy to balance development and environment, the Aravallis in Gurgaon,...

-Deccan Herald Behind all the ostentation, glitz and glamour of the recently concluded mega ‘Progressive Agriculture Summit' in Punjab lies the harsh reality of farmer suicides and the burgeoning agrarian crisis that this border state reels under. A state government commissioned study conducted by three prominent universities in Punjab lay bare the magnitude of the crisis. On an average estimate, three persons committed suicide every two days in last one decade in...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After registering five FIRs in the alleged irregularities in implementation of centrally-sponsored Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Uttar Pradesh during the rule of Mayawati-led BSP, the Central Bureau of Investigation has reportedly collected important documents related to the scheme from five districts in the state. The agency is expected to call for questioning some senior bureaucrats who were in charge of...

-The Indian Express MEA has been asked to provide details of the allowance to refugees to ascertain if they could be brought under food security The Union Law Ministry's opinion is that the food security legislation covers not just Indians but also foreign nationals and refugees. The ministry's legal affairs department gave this opinion in the backdrop of a 2012 petition by the Mool Pravah Akhil Bharat Nepal Ekta Samaj, saying that "the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Fertilizer minister Srikant Jena may keep claiming that annually 30 lakh tonne of highly subsidized urea for agriculture is being smuggled to chemical factories, but the government says states have reported only 24 such cases since 2010-11. Jena had recently said at a conference of Indian Fertilizer Association (IFA) that there are serious signs of mismanagement in an information technology-driven era when targeted farmers can be...