-Hindustan Times Revving motors, ceaseless honking, blaring music are taking a toll on those who live or work around busy roads. New Delhi: Dust mixed with toxic fumes from vehicular exhausts exacerbate lung and heart diseases and trigger death from heart attack, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung infections like pneumonia, and cancers of the lung and respiratory tract. What is less known is that traffic noise adds to this incessant vehicular assault...

-The Hindu An estimated 10 million people in nine districts of West Bengal drink arsenic-laden groundwater. Priyanka Pulla finds that despite alarms having been sounded over decades, the State government has moved at a glacial pace to tackle the crisis, while people struggle to cope with the symptoms On a Thursday morning at the government primary school in Madhusudankati, a village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, a gaggle of five-year-olds...

-The Telegraph Chandigarh: The Congress government in Punjab, like the Mamata Banerjee dispensation in Bengal, has refused to implement the flagship Health insurance scheme of the Centre. While the other north Indian states under BJP rule - Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir - have signed the memorandum of understanding with the Union Health ministry to implement the Ayushman Bharat scheme, the Amarinder Singh government in Punjab has refused to...

-The Hindu While consumers will be glad to see their fuel bills slashed by the advent of a favourable rate structure under the GST, State governments will have to contend with an erosion in tax revenue. At the time of writing, petrol was retailing at Rs.82.48/litre in Mumbai, roughly 62% more than the Rs.50.8/litre Pakistanis shell out for a tank of gas. This is despite the fact that crude oil prices are...

-The Hindu Study says poverty levels fell from 55% to 21% in a decade, mainly due to the lowered burden in the southern States Kolkata: India’s Multidimensional Poverty (MDP) has dropped significantly, largely as a result of the performance of five key southern States. Between 2005-06 to 2015-16, poverty level came down from 55% to 21%, improving the country’s MDP ranking. Following the drop in poverty levels, India moved to the 26th...