-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for higher pension to all private sector employees by dismissing a special leave petition filed by Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) against a Kerala high court judgment. The HC had asked EPFO to give pension to all retiring employees on the basis of their full salary, rather than capping the figure on which contribution is calculated at a...

-Hindustan Times The 15th Finance Commission (FC) has to submit its report in October 2019, which will be another important event in the evolution of India’s fiscal federalism framework. The tenure of the Narendra Modi government has seen important changes in India’s fiscal federalism set-up such as the abolition of the Planning Commission (PC) and the roll-out of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). The 15th Finance Commission (FC) has to submit...

-Livemint.com * Nearly 67% children in Singhbhum are underweight, the highest in India. More than half are stunted and a third suffer from wasting * In Jharkhand, malnutrition is still an alien concept, and the lack of drinking water, ration or electricity supercedes need for healthcare Singhbhum: In the waiting room of a hospital ward in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, Mukul Kalandiya is carefully holding something that from a distance looks like a...

-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...

-The Hindu Both human rights and wildlife rights groups have not used the Forest Rights Act as a conservation tool On February 13, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of more than 10 lakh Adivasis and other forest dwellers from forestland across 17 States. The petitioners, mainly wildlife NGOs, had demanded that State governments evict those forest dwellers whose claims over traditional forestland under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers...