-The Tribune Chandigarh: The worst fears about the northern region of the country losing its groundwater have been confirmed. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) satellite imagery made available to the Centre warns of fast disappearing of subsoil water in these states. The NASA report forwarded to the Punjab Government by the Union Ministry of Agriculture says that “beneath north India’s irrigated fields, the groundwater has been disappearing”. “It is being...

-Ideas for India In 2007, Bihar introduced the coupon system in PDS to curb leakages at fair price shops. This column argues that even though the administrative logic of the coupon system is fundamentally sound, such reform can be effective only when accompanied by institutional transformations that broker change in the existing local politics of inclusion and exclusion.  The performance of Bihar’s public distribution system (PDS) remains a topic of considerable national...

-The Hindu Business Line No crop diversification efforts will work so long as free electricity offsets the costs of pumping out groundwater Subsidies have for long been a necessary evil, a vote-bank silver bullet. But its relevance stands challenged in today’s increasingly market-oriented economic order. The recent US declaration of giving differential treatment to developing countries, with regard to farm subsidies, brings up the long standing issue of slashing subsidies that have...

-The Hindu Legal researcher Usha Ramanathan speaks about the the modified draft Bill which continues to raise several critical concerns relating to privacy, ethical usage of DNA samples and DNA database. This week, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) uploaded a slightly modified draft of the Human DNA Profiling Bill on its website, opening up the controversial Bill, now tabled in Parliament, for public scrutiny. Legal researcher Usha Ramanathan, a member of the Committee...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Law minister Sadananda Gowda said on Friday the ambitious e-courts project is successfully running in 13,000 courts across the country where details of 4.76 crore pending and decided cases are available online. More than one crore judgments are already online and there is constant updating of records where all past judgments would be made available. The Cabinet has given its consent to initiate phase-II of the...