-The Hindustan Times Former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh set a cat among the pigeons, in his inimitable style, at a recent national conference on climate and sustainable development at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai. He asserted that India would be "the last man standing at Paris", referring to the United Nations climate negotiations which will culminate in France in December 2015. India's current stance was "inflexible...

-The Indian Express More than four years after the RTE was passed, the state has no handle on the numbers of out-of-school children. The recently released report of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children, based on a situational analysis of India, opens a Pandora's box on data and methodological issues that plague the estimation of out-of-school children in India. As the report reveals, there is a multiplicity of definitions, sources of data...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Cancer caused almost 70% of the 3,887 health-related deaths in the atomic energy hubs across the country over the last 20 years, an RTI reply has revealed. In all, 2,600 succumbed to cancer in 19 centres between 1995 and 2014. The query to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), which, like the others, is under the Department of Atomic Energy, had another shocking revelation: 255 employees took...

-The Hindu   Research finds drastic consequences India's attempt at a China-type population control policy appears to have had drastic but unintended consequences. Laws enacted by State governments in the late 1990s and 2000s restricting political eligibility to candidates with two or less children did reduce family sizes in those States, but severely affected the sex ratio, a new Research has found. Over the period, 11 Indian States passed laws disqualifying persons with more...

-Women's Feature Service Tribal families in Bankura, West Bengal, living on a stable diet of potato and rice and occasionally some 'daal' (lentils), are now consuming a variety of vegetables, cereals, fruits and animal protein with relish on a daily basis, marking a sea change in the nutrition parametres in one of the most backward districts of India. The credit for this dramatic transformation goes to the dry land sustainable integrated farming...