-The Hindu The Compensatory Afforestation Fund is a deeply flawed and unjust mechanism Last month, Minister of State for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Mahesh Sharma informed Parliament that his Ministry has collected over ?50,000 crore in a Central compensatory afforestation fund (CAF). This money is to be used though the Compensatory Afforestation Fund (CAF) Act, 2016 or CAF, a purported mechanism to offset forest loss. Before issuing forest clearances to a...
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Supreme Court stands by its SC/ST Act judgment -Krishnadas Rajagopal
-The Hindu The court says it has only protected innocents from falling prey to arbitrary arrests under the Act. The Supreme Court said its March 20 judgment, banning immediate arrest of a person accused of insulting or injuring a Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe member, is meant to protect innocents from arbitrary arrest and not an affront to Dalit rights. The government, despite an urgent and open court hearing of its review petition, failed to...
More »Stubble burning doubles Delhi pollution: Harvard study
-PTI Researchers from Harvard and NASA have shown that in October and November about half of all pollution in Delhi can be attributed to agricultural fires on some days Boston: Agricultural fires are to blame for about half of the pollution experienced in Delhi in October and November, a peak stubble burning season in Punjab, a Harvard study has found using satellite data from NASA. Many farmers in northwest India typically burn abundant...
More »National Forest Policy Draft 2018 Takes One Step Forward, Two Steps Back -Sushant Agarwal
-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...
More »RBI didn't do audit: Central Vigilance Commissioner KV Chowdary on PNB fraud
-PTI NEW DELHI: Central Vigilance Commissioner K V Chowdary on Tuesday said the Reserve Bank of India had apparently not conducted an audit during the period of time when a Rs 13,000-crore scam hit the Punjab National Bank. Chowdary stressed the need to put into PLAce a more robust auditing system. "They did not do this (an audit)," the head of the probity watchdog said. The CVC exercises superintendence over the CBI which...
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