- Guardian News & Media 2014   The world's most widely used insecticides have contaminated the Environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment of the chemicals' impacts. The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Silent Spring, the landmark 1956 book by Rachel Carson that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the blanket use of DDT and other...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: About 40 busloads of citizens die on the capital's roads every year but the deaths do not shock anyone and governments over the years have done little to stop it. In the six years from 2008 to 2013, more than 12,300 people died in road accidents here. Last year alone, there were 1,820 deaths. An assessment of road accidents done by Centre for Science and Environment...

-The Business Standard     Foreign direct investment in the NGO sector is, in fact, no different from the cross-holdings and the FDI web of the corporate world  ClimateWorks, one of the two international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) recently restricted by the National Democratic Alliance government from funding Greenpeace India Society in India, also funds another NGO, Global International, which, till recently, was headed in India by Union Environment and Forests minister Prakash Javadekar. When...

-The Business Standard   How a law to conserve groundwater led to a better paid and better organised migrant workforce Ludhiana: For some years now, Punjab's fields have lain fallow through the searing dry heat of May; but come June's steamy humidity, small bands of lithe, slender men from Bihar fan out across the waterlogged paddy fields, transplanting rice saplings with fluid efficiency. Bihar's paddy planters have frequented Punjab since the 1960s when rice...

-The Hindu   We need freeways, but we also need forests. Crimes against women have been constantly in the news. But crimes against nature remain largely unreported. Given the current climate, with the Intelligence Bureau claiming that non-governmental organisations like the crusading international Environmental group Greenpeace, are detrimental to India's progress, and with the ubiquitous ‘foreign hand' making a serendipitous comeback, such crimes are likely to become invisible, noticed only by those who have...