-The Times of India NEW DELHI: India ranks the highest among the world's most disaster-prone countries for displacement of residents, with 23 lakh, on average, uprooted due to calamities such as floods, cyclones and earthquakes. A UN study, to be released on the International Day for Disaster Reduction on Friday, forecast a continued rise in homelessness. China, with annual average displacement of 13 lakh, ranks second. The estimation of displaced people in India may...

-Scroll.in Notified in September, the rules will facilitate the development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dump After ignoring repeated directions from the Supreme Court to notify stricter rules to protect the country’s wetlands, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has gone and done just the opposite. On September 26, it published the Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017 – replacing the older rules dating back to...

-The Indian Express The Food Safety and Standards Regulations, 2.3.4, prohibit the use of tobacco and nicotine as ingredients in any food products and bans sale of all food products where tobacco is present as ingredient such as gutka and pan masala. Pune: The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) issued a directive on October 9 banning the manufacture, sale and distribution of gutka and pan masala (with tobacco and...

-Livemint.com Wholesale prices of just-harvested kharif pulses have dropped below the government’s minimum support prices (MSP) despite a lower crop output New Delhi: Wholesale prices of just harvested kharif pulses have dropped below the government’s minimum support prices (MSP) despite a lower crop output, forcing farmers to sell their produce at a loss in States such as Rajasthan. For instance, price data from wholesale markets available on the Agmarket website showed that on...

-The Times of India Many members of the Niti Aayog's newly constituted Working Group on Nutrition have significant conflicts of interests. Several are representatives of international agencies, which have close ties to multinational food companies including Nestle, Hindustan Unilever, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Mars and Ajinomoto, and which have been pushing packaged therapeutic food to address malnutrition. The government has repeatedly clarified that packaged energy dense food is against India's policy on...