-The Telegraph Guwahati: Union tourism secretary Pervez Dewan has asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to remove a sentence in a Class X geography textbook that reads tourism has not been encouraged in the Northeast "for strategic reasons". For Kavya Barnadhya Hazarika, a Class XI student of Maharishi Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School here, it's a lesson learnt that persistence pays. Kavya had written to both President Pranab...

-The Indian Express Why the proposed national minimum wage is the wrong answer to questions of unemployment and poverty The recent national labour conference - a trade union love fest with little real employer participation - demanded a national minimum wage. The trade union demand is a predictable positioning of narrow self-interest as national interest but the government's acceptance of their demand is unfair, delusional and economically stupid. Unfair, because it pampers a...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Southern states have emerged on top on financial inclusion parameters, while the East and some of the developed states of the West - including Gujarat and Maharashtra - are below the national average. A new index on financial inclusion released by ratings and analytics firm Crisil on Tuesday showed that Puducherry topped the list, followed by Chandigarh and Kerala. In fact, most of the top slots...

-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 Hindu     Unorthodox models of conservation are needed to save this elusive and magnificent big bird "Have you seen the Big Five?" That's the question you will invariably be asked if you visit the East African states. The Big Five, Africa's largest, and thus most prominent, mammals - the lion, the rhino, the leopard, the buffalo and the elephant - have dominated camp fire stories, tourist expectations and the growth of conservation. Across...