-The Hindu Over the years we have lost over a lakh varieties of native rice. One district in Odisha is rediscovering some of them It is a balmy winter morning when I meet Kamli Bataraa, an ebullient Adivasi farmer, at her home in Belugan, in southern Odisha’s Koraput district. There is a hum across the village from the threshing of just-harvested paddy. When I ask Kamli about the rice varieties she grows,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: About 50 academics and activists have written to President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking a judicial probe into the police baton charge on Banaras Hindu University students last night. The students were protesting vice-chancellor G.C. Tripathi's alleged shaming of a girl student who had been molested on the campus on Thursday evening. In their common letter to the President - the Visitor of the university...

-TheWire.in Eleven years after order, none of the states have conformed to the guidelines, says a Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report. New Delhi: Eleven years ago, on this day, the Supreme Court had issued directions to the Centre and state governments to transform their police forces into professional, accountable and efficient service units. However, a recent report shows that compliance remains far from satisfactory with none of the governments enacting laws to...

-The Indian Express The move came about, the letter mentions, during a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on August 25, 2017, where it was found that proof of pending recommendations being implemented was present only on paper. Mumbai: The Union Home Ministry has written to police forces across the country to assess their efforts to encourage citizens to move to cashless transactions and curb fake currency and...

-Deccan Herald As a railway buff, I love the technology story of the bullet train. However, it is not appropriate for India, in the current configuration as negotiated by Prime Minister Narendra and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail line, for which they laid the foundation stone on September 14. The Shinkansen bullet trains were introduced in Japan in 1964 and traversed the 500-plus kilometre distance between Tokyo...