-The Hindu Attacked for taking on Jindal Steel and Power Ltd, claim supporters Ramesh Agrawal, an environmental activist who clashed with powerful steel and coal interests in Chhattisgarh’s coal-rich Raigarh district, was attacked by unidentified assailants and shot through the thigh on Saturday morning. Mr. Agrawal has been hospitalised. Sarita Rath, a member of the Jan Chetna Manch, Mr. Agrawal’s NGO, said he had been attacked at the behest of officials from Jindal...

-Down to Earth As corruption hijacks procurement centres in Bundelkhand, farmers prefer suicide to a debt trap. Richard Mahapatra reports from Uttar Pradesh with photographer Sayantoni Palchoudhuri A fatal paradox strikes Bundelkhand in the face—an overflowing wheat stock yet an overwhelming number of farmer suicides. Farmers here dread the government wheat procurement centre and the post-mortem house. In Orai, a small town in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, the two are...

The latest NCPCR survey report reveals large-scale child labour in Bt cotton production; asks stakeholders to prepare an action plan to eliminate it Forced to work for 14-hours at a stretch and even carry pesticides on their back, the plight children engaged as child labour in the Bt cotton production has often gone unnoticed, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has said in its latest survey report. To rescue...

There are major issues at stake in the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development to be held on 20-22 June. Yet governments of developing countries have not given adequate importance to the run-up to the conference. As has happened in the climate change negotiations, the outcome draft now under negotiation shows a concerted move to rewrite the terms of global environmental governance. There is an attempt to push through the decidedly...

-PTI Rising populations are driving the Earth towards a catastrophic breakdown where species we depend on would die out, an international team of scientists has claimed, blaming the crisis on over use of water, forests and land for agriculutre.  Writing in the journal Nature, the team warned that the world is headed toward a tipping point marked by extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale not seen since the glaciers retreated 12,000...