-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Jharkhand’s bureaucrats have denied thousands of farm workers their legally mandated livelihoods under the guise of plugging leakages in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), say activists. Earlier this month, HT reported that the ministry of rural development had cancelled 93 lakh MGNREGA job cards — of which 2.67 lakh cards were from Jharkhand — to weed out duplicates and cards corresponding to dead beneficiaries. At the...

-Scroll.in The Public Health Foundation of India had been working on government programmes since 2010. The Ministry of Home Affairs has barred the Public Health Foundation of India from receiving foreign funding by revoking its registration under the Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act. The ministry cited the organisation’s lobbying against tobacco use as one of the reasons for the move. However, as the foundation’s officials have pointed out, it has been working...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday questioned the Union government for making the Aadhaar biometric identification number mandatory for those getting a permanent account number (pan) card from the income tax authorities. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, told a bench headed by Justice A.K. Sikri that the government has detected pan cards based on fake documents. Rohatgi said there were instances of one person having multiple pan...

-The Telegraph Chandigarh: The chief ministers of neighbouring Punjab and Haryana have agreed to cooperate on action against sex determination centres, which are illegal, and female foeticide. Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh of the Congress today responded to a Twitter appeal from his Haryana counterpart, Manohar Lal Khattar of the BJP, and ordered the Punjab health department and police to launch a crackdown on sex determination centres operating in Punjab. "I appeal to...

-The Indian Express "You have no sense of responsibility. Do you think you have the liberty to say whatever you want?" The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Thursday said that Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s allegation of bias in the green panel’s report on the damage caused to the Yamuna riverbed due to a culture festival organised by AOL is ‘shocking’. The NGT said: “You have no sense of responsibility....