-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Taking action against corrupt officials could soon get harder. A parliamentary panel has backed a move to bar anti-graft agencies from probing bribery allegations against public servants without the government’s approval. The government can take up to four months to decide if the police should register the bribery case, and there will be no penalty if it takes longer. However, its sanction would not be required if the official...

-Livemint.com NGO Common Cause said in a petition that governments and law enforcement agencies had abused sedition laws to gag dissent, suppress freedom of speech and expression and to muzzle critical voices New Delhi: Common Cause, a non-governmental organization, on Wednesday moved the Supreme Court, alleging misuse and misapplication of sedition laws by successive governments, leading to routine persecution of students, journalists and intellectuals engaged in social activism. Common Cause said in...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-Earth Island Journal It’s too early to hail Sikkim’s transition to chemicals-free agriculture an outright success, say observers Sikkim, the picturesque northeastern Indian state in the eastern Himalayas, announced in January that it had transitioned completely to organic agriculture — the first state in the South Asian nation to do so. The process of shifting to organic agriculture was initiated by the state government 13 years ago when it launched the Sikkim Organic...

-The Hindu Chennai: Even as various agencies push farmers to take up cultivation of pulses, questions about seed availability and procurement are making agriculturists think twice about taking it up. Pulses bring in more profits, take lesser time to grow, require lesser water than paddy and fix nitrogen in the soil, thus reducing the use of fertilizers for the next crop. “Though the price of pulses in the retail market is quite...