-Livemint.com The National Forest Policy will be an overarching policy for forest management, with the aim of bringing a minimum of one-third of India’s total geographical area under forest or tree cover New Delhi: India’s environment ministry has unveiled a draft of the new National Forest Policy (NFP) that proposes to restrict “schemes and projects which interfere with forests that cover steep slopes, catchments of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, geologically unstable terrain...

-The Hindu Business Line The SC interim order presents the biometric ID as a fait accompli for the underprivileged Last week’s interim order of the Supreme Court on a batch of petitions challenging Aadhaar may have provided temporary relief to a section of the population, but it appears to have simultaneously served notice on another section – a largely disadvantaged one — that the contentious biometric identification is something of a fait...

-The Indian Express Forest Rights Act is not an obstacle to growth. Its non-implementation will be politically counter-productive. The farmers’ and forest dwellers’ march from Nashik to Mumbai, and the Maharashtra government’s decision to approve most of their demands within the next six months, has established the fact that land and forest rights are going to be determining factors for political establishments across India. The protest in Mumbai tells us that a...

-Scroll.in The Nobel laureate noted that the country does not yet have the jobs essential to sustain the projected growth in demography. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Saturday warned that India may end up with mass unemployment if its manufacturing sector does not grow, News18 reported. The American economist was speaking at an event that the news channel had organised. “As the world’s economies took off because of growth in the manufacturing...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: A winter rain shortfall of 63% in January and February across India has led to reservoir levels dropping in the major river basins of the Sabarmati, Kaveri and Tapi. While agriculture ministry officials said this will not impact the rabi crop significantly, farmers in Gujarat--where water level in the Sardar Sarovar dam is below normal--are worried about cotton sowing. “In the current situation, there is deficient water...