-The Hindu There has been sharp rise in the NPAs amid COVID-19 pandemic With unemployment rising, the ability of those who have taken education loans to pay back has come down sharply. As a result, the non-performing assets (NPAs) have increased in the last one-and-a-half years. R. Nagarajan had taken a loan for his engineering course and started repaying it when he got a job at a start-up in the second half of...

-TheWire.in The Press Club of India, Mumbai Press Club and Indian Women’s Press Corps have all condemned the attempted and successful surveillance on journalists and others. New Delhi: Several journalists’ bodies have condemned the attempted and successful surveillance on phones linked to journalists, ministers and officials, among others, as revealed in reports under the Pegasus Project following investigation carried out by The Wire and several other global media organisations. Describing it as “unprecedented”...

-TheWire.in The two have said that Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code will continue to "haunt and hinder" the right to free speech and the freedom of the press. New Delhi: Journalists Patricia Mukhim and Anuradha Bhasin have become the latest to move Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of sedition law contending that the colonial-era penal provision was being used to intimidate, silence and punish scribes. Mukhim is editor of The...

-GaonConnection.com A new study points out how waste segregation suffers as 70% of households in Haridwar and 90% in Rishikesh use a single bin for waste disposal; and a large chunk of plastic waste flows into the local water bodies, including the Ganges. Up to 35 per cent of the total plastic waste generated in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, leaks into its water bodies. Twenty kilometres to the northeast from Haridwar, the situation in...

-The Hindu Lower stunting among children with mothers who had access to free school lunches, shows data from 1993-2016. Girls who had access to the free lunches provided at government schools, had children with a higher height-to-age ratio than those who did not, says a new study on the inter-generational benefits of India’s midday meal scheme published in Nature Communications this week. Using nationally representative data on cohorts of mothers and their children...