-Newsclick.in The Supreme Court has refused to stay the demolitions of over 10,000 houses in a bid to preserve the forest cover in the locality in Haryana’s Faridabad. On June 7, a bench of the Supreme Court, while hearing a petition on the clearance of encroachment over the Aravalli zone, had ordered the removal of close to 10,000 homes, housing over 1 lakh people in Haryana’s Khori Gaon, near the national capital....

-Newslaundry.com The state’s River Training Policy appears designed to allow near unfettered mining of sand and boulders by private contractors, bypassing green clearance and scientific assessment. In November 2020, a few months before floods ravaged Uttarakhand, the deputy collector of Purnagiri in Tanakpur district announced an open auction of tenders to desilt the riverbed in Champawat’s villages. Tenders for government work usually seek the lowest bidder, the contractor willing to do the job...

A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) states that the countrywide lockdown imposed on 25th March, 2020, which was extended for nearly two months in phases, affected the food and nutritional status of vulnerable sections of the Indian population. It says that a programme like the Mid-Day Meal Scheme covers four-fifth of primary-school-aged children in the country that helps in improving not only nutrition but also...

-TheWire.in For millions of rural families who still lack access to good internet connectivity or are computer illiterate, the programme may end up increasing out-of-pocket expenses. As part of the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP), the central government intends to create an Aadhaar-like unique identification for every land parcel in the country. The initiative named Unique Land Parcel Identification Number (ULPIN) will assign a geo-referenced 14-digit alphanumeric unique ID for...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...