-The Indian Express Delhi’s slums house people whose work makes the lives of its better-off citizens easier but they themselves offer the worst of living conditions. Lakhs of people are denied the basic need for a toilet, breeding indignity and infections. The city’ urban shelter agency DUSIB’s report on how to make the city slum-free is a challenge for any government, especially one elected on a pro-poor agenda. The Indian Express...

-The Telegraph   Tribal ministry to cover 6 lakh children of indigenous communities in Assam     Guwahati: The Union tribal affairs ministry, with the help of the health department, is planning to cover at least six lakh tribal children in Assam, including those of tea garden workers, under its sickle-cell anaemia screening programme this year. Sickle-cell anaemia is a blood disorder characterised by an abnormality in haemoglobin that carries oxygen from the lungs to...

-The Hindu Business Line The recent devastation of crops shows that the Indian economy continues to be a ‘gamble’ on the rain. But can India Meteorological Department’s new model make it predictable? Moisture wrecks a farmer's life. Since February this year, lakhs of farmers across 14 states were left with damaged crops. Unseasonal rains destroyed crops on 11 million hectares spread over Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Punjab....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a fresh threat to the fragile ecosystem of the Aravalis, the Haryana forest department has reversed its earlier order and asked officials not to designate lands in the range as forests, other than those formally recorded as such. The order implies that vast tracts of forests, including most parts of the sacred Mangarbani grove, would now be recorded as 'not forest'. This reverses the department's...

-The Telegraph Shillong: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has "disapproved" of the Meghalaya government's not formulating appropriate policies and guidelines for coal mining while it found "no merit" in the government's defence for its inability to execute the tribunal's orders. "Without hesitation, we record our disapproval for the said conduct of the state of Meghalaya in not formulating appropriate policy and guidelines despite orders of the tribunal, even after lapse of a...