-The Times of India NOIDA: The sand mafia, against which suspended IAS officer Durga Nagpal had started a campaign, has been responsible for the Yamuna shifting course about 500 metres east, posing a threat to sectors 150, 151, 153, 135, 167 and 168 of Noida. Irrigation department officials here say they have repeatedly warned the district administration about this and also filed several FIRs with the police, the last one in March...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: India has lost around 20% of its languages in the past five decades, a survey by the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has revealed. The country had 1,100 languages in 1961, but nearly 220 of them have disappeared, said Ganesh Devy, writer and lead co-ordinator of the survey called the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). The survey was carried out over two years from 2011. "We...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A parliamentary panel has disapproved of the process the Planning Commission and the Centre follow to identify below poverty line (BPL) people, adding to the recent controversy over a 15 per cent reduction in poverty. The standing committee on finance, headed by the BJP's Yashwant Sinha, has outlined flaws in the methodology followed by the Planning Commission and the government to identify the poor. The measure is key...

-The Hindustan Times * What is a poverty line? The poverty line defines a threshold income. Households earning below this threshold are considered poor. Different countries have different methods of defining the threshold income depending on local socio-economic needs. * Who brings out the poverty estimates in India? The Planning Commission releases the poverty estimates in India. * How is it measured? Poverty is measured based on consumer expenditure surveys of...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Eliminating Planning Commission's role in etching the poverty line and instead tasking expert government agencies to determine India's below poverty line population may help depoliticize the exercise, a former top NSSO official has said. Former director-general of National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) Jogeshwar Dash feels the Planning Commission's mandate of framing policy clashes with estimating poverty ratios that are an outcome of strategies the panel devises. "Poverty...