-The Telegraph New Delhi: Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan today urged environment minister Anil Dave to reject a regulatory panel's recommendation to release genetically modified mustard for commercial cultivation, questioning the regulatory process and claims about the plant's superiority. In a letter to Dave, Bhushan cited a Supreme Court hearing on GM crops and described India's regulatory mechanisms for such crops as "farcical". He asked Dave to "withhold" his approval to the...

-The Hindu How Tiruppur, India’s knitwear hub, is now weaving a green cover for the entire district We moved this tree 15 km on a truck along the stretch between Avinashi and Avinashipalayam.” V. Mahendran points to a hulking tree trunk. “The operation took us nine hours. Even with its branches and most of its canopy chopped off, it weighed more than 40 tonnes.” We are at the Tiruppur Collectorate, and Mahendran,...

-The Times of India GURUGRAM: Last year, Haryana's sex ratio (the number of girls per 1,000 boys) touched 900. In the first quarter of this year, it galloped to 935. The number for March 2017 was still higher, 950. To put these numbers in perspective, the national sex ratio for children in the 2011 Census was 919. In Haryana, the number stood at 834. There is now suspicion that the remarkable surge...

-The Hindu The core issues are affordable access to medicines and their rational prescription and use The Medical Council of India (MCI) issued a circular on April 21 drawing attention to clause 1.5 of its regulations regarding the professional conduct of doctors: “Every physician should prescribe drugs with generic names legibly and preferably in capital letters and he/she shall ensure that there is a rational prescription of drugs.” Further, the circular said,...

-PTI Activists claim the facilities existed only on paper Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh): Toilets have gone “MISsing” from a house in a Chhattisgarh village and a woman and her daughter want the police to trace them fast. The women filed a written complaint with the police last week after they found out that the two toilets, proposed under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, were shown in documents as already having been constructed with funds released for...