-The Hindu Tamnar, Raigarh: Standing on the edge of a monstrous, black gorge 72 year old Kaniram, a Birhor tribal, stretched his left hand to point at the mud thatched house that he had in the hill slope. However, one could only see waves of unending charcoal coloured hills in the backdrop. The area - definitely not less than few hundred square kilometers - looks grey but Kaniram found the whole...

-The Hindu Lax monitoring, poor public engagement and inadequate training to vaccinators have dealt a serious blow to the crucial pentavalent immunisation programme The Pentavalent vaccine, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare's latest addition to the immunisation programme, has run into a storm. The Supreme Court has sent a notice to the Ministry asking why the vaccine should not be banned in the country. The vaccine is no stranger to controversy. A...

-The Hindu That one-third of the food produced annually for human consumption is wasted is in itself unconscionable in a world where 870 million, or one in eight people, go hungry every day. A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report now says that this high volume of wastage that occurs right through the food supply chain exerts an adverse impact on land, water, biodiversity and climate change. This impact...

-The Hindu The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) will examine whether developmental interventions and constitutional safeguards - including Fifth Schedule provisions - have come to the aid of tribal people in Left Wing Extremism (LWE)-affected districts in central India. An NAC Working Group (WG) headed by tribal expert Professor Virginius Xaxa - who also heads the Prime Minister's high level committee that is to produce a report on the...

-The Telegraph Three of the nine experts assigned the job of saving the Ganga resigned from a high-powered central body today, voicing their frustration at being kept out of the loop and the "furious pace" of clearing projects they had repeatedly opposed. In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who chairs the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA), the three said the government had not convened a single meeting of the...