-NDTV.com 80-year-old Bhandari Das is now a widow and her children are married. But they are still considered "foreigners" in India. Guwahati: Bhandari Das fled from Bangladesh to India, an ally, in 1967 along with her husband and two children to escape "religious persecution" in her then hometown in Sylhet. She has lived as a foreigner at a village in Assam's Cachar district since then. 54 years later, the 80-year-old is now a...

-Hindustan Times The Union environment ministry has come out with a consultation paper on amending the Forest Conservation Act 1980 to bring significant changes to forest governance in India including facilitating private plantations for harvesting and exploration or extraction of oil and natural gas deep beneath forest land by drilling holes from outside the forest areas. Here are the highlights of the environment ministry’s proposal: Forests on private land Until December 1996, provisions of...

-The Hindu Business Line Surplus stocks, high cost of production among worries Sugar mills in India gear up to start the new crushing season this month with a concern. Sugar production has grown at an annual growth rate of 5.6 per cent over the past two decades, while consumption has grown at 2.4 per cent per annum. In the last five years, consumption of sugar has remained relatively static at about 25...

-The Hindu Centre committed to turning the north-east into oil palm hub, says Agriculture Minister Guwahati: Arunachal Pradesh has finalised the National Mission on Edible Oils-Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) and will go “full swing” in implementing it across 1.33 lakh hectares soon, Chief Minister Pema Khandu has said. Speaking at the ‘Business Summit for North Eastern States’ on the NMEO-OP in Guwahati on Tuesday, Mr. Khandu said Arunachal Pradesh is geographically the largest State...

-Down to Earth There are prominent shortcomings in implementation, especially registration of workers and and collection and distribution of Cess The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic had widespread and devastating consequences to communities and enterprises in India and across the globe. However, the situation was particularly grim for the 453.6 million internal migrants in India, evidenced by the unprecedented ‘reverse migration’ witnessed during the pandemic.  Their vulnerabilities were exacerbated by the fact a...