-The Hindu     Ignou's dual talk leaves students in the lurch Nobody would have thought that in less than two years of setting up of the first Indian Sign Language Research & Training Centre (ISLRTC) for the hearing-impaired, plans would be afoot to shut it down. But that is what seems to be happening at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (Ignou) campus here. Vice-Chancellor M. Aslam categorically told The Hindu that there was...

-Timescrest.com Three successive CAG reports warned the Uttarakhand govt about the consequences of multiple hydropower projects, and their unpreparedness in the face of disaster. The advice was ignored. With aim of turning Uttarakhand into Urja Pradesh, the state has committed to building 680 dams, currently in various stages of commissioning, construction and planning. The powers that be have expedited the clearances for these projects. However, when it came to the issue of credible...

Groundwater, which irrigates half of Indian agriculture and provides 85% of rural drinking consumption, is an increasingly scarce resource. There is a growing understanding that it must be approached as a common property resource for collective benefit. It is best understood and managed by those who live near them and use them rather than agencies who visit sporadically - that is the central premise of efforts around participatory groundwater management....

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Between 2009-10 and 2011-12, the proportion of people working slipped slightly in India, and the share of unemployed persons ticked up, a government report released on Thursday has revealed. In 2009-10, 36.5% of the population was gainfully employed for the better part of the year. By 2011-12, the proportion of such workers had dipped to 35.4%. Meanwhile the unemployment rate went up from 2.5% to...