-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A 100-metre area on either side of Ganga between Haridwar and Unnao (Uttar Pradesh) will be a "no-construction, no-development zone", the National Green Tribunal ruled on Thursday while ordering a green compensation of Rs 50,000 on anyone dumping waste in the river. In a 543-page judgment on advocate MC Mehta's petition on Ganga pollution, the NGT also directed that no dumping or landfill could come up...

-The Hindu Lack of education at primary and secondary levels is seen as one of the main reasons The percentage of Muslim students in leading State and Central universities of West Bengal is abysmally low, revealed the sixth All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) for the year 2015-16. The report, prepared by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, was released on Monday. Among the elite institutions that could not enrol any Muslim...

-Hindustan Times It’s a paradoxical fact. Families become smaller as better nutrition, vaccination and healthcare ensure couples lose fewer children to malnutrition and infections, such as diarrhoea, pneumonia, sepsis and tuberculosis India’s most comprehensive report card on health released earlier this year shows India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped from an average of 2.7 children per women in 2006 to 2.2 a decade later. Around two in three states that are...

-The Indian Express At present no centralised data is available on lynchings, which have been reported in cases of theft, witchcraft, and recently over child theft and cow-protection. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), that tabulates and analyses crime data from across the country every year, is Planning to now collect detailed data on lynchings as well. If this is approved by the Union Home Ministry, the NCRB will collect country-wide...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Amid cow vigilantism, a professor of economics specialising in agrarian issues today wondered aloud whether those demanding a nationwide ban on cow slaughter had thought about its fallout, more so as a beginning had been made with the restrictions on the sale of animals for slaughter at cattle markets. A calculation by professor Vikas Rawal of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University's School...