The income and asset details furnished by ministers to Prime Minister’s Office for 2009-10 have some surprising claims. Textiles minister Dayanidhi Maran, whose family owns a media empire, is worth just Rs 6.87 crore. His assets include a Mercedes E class valued at Rs 8.10 lakh and a Toyota Innova at Rs 12.24 lakh. He is not the only who has modest assets. Minister of new and renewable energy Farooq Abdullah...

India's key sectors like water, forest, health and agriculture will be affected in a major way due to the increase in net temperature by 1.7- 2.2 degree celsius in another 20 years in the four climate hotspots. The "Climate Change and India: a 4x4 assessment" report, which was released today providing an assessment of impact of climate change in 2030, also predicts an increase in precipitation (rain, snow and storm) in...

Even as the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment — dubbed “the Indian Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” — released its first report on the impact of climate change in four regions of the country, it admitted that significant research gaps and lack of extensive databases were hampering Indian climate science. Long-term localised data was not available on vegetation and forest cover, socio-economic trends, farm inputs, pests and crop diseases,...

With a battle already brewing between central and state governments over the share of financial liabilities to implement the much-debated Right to Education (RTE) Act, activists fear that such a tussle would be a deadly blow to the law itself. While Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has strictly asked all the states to mobilise funds to implement the Act, most of the state governments, including Karnataka have expressed their...

All school children across the country will soon have unique identification numbers (UID) which will help in tracking their movement in educational institutions and academic records. This follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Union Human Resource Development Ministry and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) here on Wednesday. The system will help in tracking students' mobility by creating an electronic registry, right from the primary level through...