-The Hindu Under the PM Ujjwala Yojana, rural areas that still rely on solid fuel can be encouraged in three ways to use clean fuel When we introduced ourselves to Kishan Kumar Dubey, he remembered that we had visited his home four years ago. Mr. Dubey was a respondent in our study conducted on solid fuel use in 1,550 households between August and December 2018. Wearing glasses, Mr. Dubey sat on his...

-The Times of India GUWAHATI: Many NRC applicants in Assam who had submitted refugee registration certificates to back their residency claims are in a fix after the authorities rejected 60 out of every 100 such documents on grounds of unavailability of corresponding records with the government to corroborate their authenticity. “This is just a conservative estimate. The number could be higher,” said an official involved in the process of updating the NRC...

  In the month of June this year, encephalitis related deaths in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district grabbed the headlines. Actually, most of the children, who were admitted or died at Shri Krishna Medical College and Hospital (SKMCH), hailed from East Champaran, Vaishali, Sitamarhi and Samastipur apart from Muzaffarpur. Unfortunately, till recently official data on the number of cases and deaths related to Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) was unavailable for...

-The Indian Express Helping farmers produce solar energy can help realise the government’s target of doubling farmers’ incomes. In July, two interesting things happened that can help Indian farmers to a large extent in augmenting their incomes. First, the Union Finance Minister (FM) in her maiden budget speech asked why the annadata (farmer) cannot become the urjadata (producer of solar power). Second, in Parliament, the agriculture minister for state, responding to...

-Down to Earth The National Democratic Alliance government's move is an assault on the independence of information commissioners, writes former Central Information Commissioner M Sridhar Acharyulu Alas! I thought the Narendra Modi government is strong enough after its re-election. But now it is scared of the Right to Information (RTI) and the Chief Information Commission (CIC), as if they are monsters who can harm the power of the powerful rulers. The Information Commissioner...