-The Business Standard Chulhas - cook stoves of poor women who collect sticks, twigs, leaves and every other biomass material they can find to cook meals - are today at the centre of failing international action. The concern is that women are breathing toxic emissions from the stove and that these same emissions are also adding to the world's climate change burden. The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 established that...

-The Times of India As India heads towards a bruising general election, one of the key issues in the minds of both people and political parties is jobs. Big parties and their star campaigners can already be heard harping on the theme. The reason is that the jobs scenario has been decidedly grim for more than a decade. Between 2000 and 2012, jobs have increased at an abysmal rate of just 2.2%...

-Kafila.org The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill was meant to be an enactment to codify India's obligations under the UNCRPD, which it ratified without reservations. There was a Committee set up in 2009 by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, headed by Smt. Sudha Kaul, to draft a Bill to this effect. Like the UNCRPD says, the Committee included different people with disabilities - across disabilities - to draft...

-Grain.org "We take care of the cow and the cow takes care of us," says Marayal, a farmer in Thalavady, Tamil Nadu. Her two cows produce 6 to 10 litres of milk a day, which she sells for 30-40 cents per litre. Across India, there are millions of backyard dairy farmers like Marayal. Each owning just one or two cows, these farmers supply millions more families and hundreds of thousands of informal...

-Down to Earth 'CPCB underestimating pollution from coal-fired thermal power plants' Data released by NASA's Aura satellite calls into question the veracity of Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) claim made in 2012 that the mean sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions in India decreased in 2010 as compared to 2001 level. A new study led by Zifeng Lu of Decision and Information Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, USA, based on images...