-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The monsoon is likely to remain strong through the month of June, the India Meteorological Department said on Thursday, as another storm system developed over the Bay of Bengal, promising widespread rain across central and south India over the next four-five days. As on June 18, the monsoon was 10% above normal, mainly on account of excess rains over central India, the southeastern coast and parts...

-Outlook New Delhi: Over 8,000 children are working in garment factories in different parts of the national capital, an NGO report has revealed. The report, titled 'The Hidden Workforce', by NGO Save the Children, was today released by Delhi Minister for Women and Child Development Sandeep Kumar. According to the report, over 8,000 children are engaged in the booming garment industry and up to 70 per cent of them could be girls. The highest...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The summer monsoon weakened across large swathes of India in the past century, scientists said today, linking the reductions in rainfall to hitherto-unobserved trends that they say portend a dangerous drying of the Indian subcontinent. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said they had identified a significant weakening trend in summer rainfall between 1901 and 1912 over central and northern India, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basins and...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Various rights groups have urged the government to hold a public consultation on the proposed amendments to the Child Labour Bill, which they warned will end up legitimizing economic exploitation of children and rob them of their childhood. They have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking a public consultation on the amendments and called for the removal of the provision seeking to legitimise use of children under 14...