-Outlook A controversy has arisen over directions to school teachers in certain Bihar districts to dissuade people from defecating in the open and click pictures of those who refused to pay heed. Orders issued by block education officers asked teachers to do rounds in various wards and panchayat areas in the mornings and evenings and ask people to use toilets. They were also directed to click photographs to shame those who insisted on...

-The Indian Express In Jharkhand, ABBA was first made compulsory for PDS users in Ranchi district in August 2016. By June 2017, it was mandatory in about 80 per cent of the ration shops across the state. This meant, of course, that Aadhaar itself was compulsory — no Aadhaar, no food. Recent events in Jharkhand shed some useful light on the damage done by compulsory biometric authentication in the Public Distribution...

-The Indian Express Considering that egg production isn’t going to recover as fast as broiler, consumers may have to wait for a few weeks for prices to ease. New Delhi/ Pune: Egg prices have gone through the roof, so much so that at current retail rates of around Rs 7 per piece, it may be more worthwhile for people to eat chicken instead. Poultry farmers in the Pune region are now selling eggs...

-Hindustan Times While Delhi came under flak for running fewer buses than that it did three years ago and therefore failing to enforce blanket road rationing, compliance of even basic anti-pollution measures was impossible in the NCR because of poor infrastructure. The Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) mandated by the Supreme Court to counter air pollution was meant to be an effort in regional cooperation. The entire National Capital Region (NCR), which...

-Hindustan Times The audit also recommended abolishing admission quotas, including those under the discretion of the vice-chancellor; no official reason was given for the audit. New Delhi: The Aligarh Muslim University must abolish separate colleges for male and female undergraduate students, do away with discretionary admission quotas and merge the departments for Sunni and Shia studies, a government-backed audit of the institution has suggested. These are among the top recommendations the audit made...