-Live Mint ‘Give me any job... but please take me out of this hell', says 57-year-old Saraswati, a manual scavenger New Delhi: Saraswati doesn't remember the last time her bare hands touched the statues of the gods lying on a shaky wooden plank in a corner of her one-room house in Farrukhnagar village of Ghaziabad district. She doesn't remember the last time she prayed or fasted. She says every part of her body...

-PTI NEW DELHI: In a blow to brick-kiln industry and road contractors, the National Green Tribunal has banned digging of earth across the country for making bricks and roads without prior environment clearance (EC). A bench headed by Justice P Jyothimani has directed the chief secretaries of all the states and union territories to ensure that its interim order is adhered to. "We restrain any person, company and authority to carry out any...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: There is more certainty than ever before that earth is warming under "human influence", said a report compiled by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warning that only "substantial and sustained reduction" of greenhouse gas emissions will limit the disaster of climate change. IPCC raised the likelihood of human activities causing global warming from "very likely" in its 2007 report to "extremely likely" -...

-The Financial Express In an article published in this newspaper on September 4, 2013, Surjit Bhalla takes us to task for critiquing his earlier estimates of the cost of the Food Security Bill. Bhalla asserted that subsidy expenditures would more than triple and the FSB would cost the government R3,14,000 crore annually or 3% of GDP. We argued that Bhalla was barking up the wrong tree and that the main things...

-Live Mint BJP-ruled states to get more funds, while most Congress-ruled states will lose out if report's funding formula is accepted New Delhi: Odisha, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are the least developed (or the most backward) in that order, according to a government committee whose recommendations, if accepted, will mean a larger share of central funds for these states. Goa, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are India's most developed states, according...