-The Telegraph Guwahati: Apart from Tripura and Sikkim, enrolment for Aadhaar cards remains very low in the northeastern states, with Assam at the bottom of the list. According to figures available with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which handles the Aadhaar project, as on November 30, 2014, the percentage of enrolment against the total population was abysmally low in Assam - 0.3 per cent. The trend is not much better in...

-Down to Earth Government sidelines its committee of experts to set up new panel to review India's intellectual property rights policy The politics of protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) is becoming more curiouswith the commerce ministry setting up a think tank to draft a national IPR policy while sidelining a committee of experts it had set up earlier. Annoyed academics who were asked to help formulate the policy in July this year...

-Down to Earth Health experts blame Centre's over-emphasis on women's sterilisation for the Chhattisgarh tragedy THERE WAS nothing right about the sterilisation camp held on November 8 in Chhattisgarh's Takhatpur block of Bilaspur district. An overambitious government doctor-with unsterilised equipment and virtually no manpower-set out to conduct laparoscopic tubectomy on 83 women in an abandoned private hospital. The mass sterilisation led to the death of 13 women and left others critically ill. They were...

-The Telegraph Guwahati (Assam): Aaranyak, an Assam-based NGO working for the conservation of nature, has won an United Nations award for its community-based flood early warning system that has benefited 40 villages in flood-prone Dhemaji and Lakhimpur districts. It has won the award along with Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) for the 2014 Lighthouse Activities awards under the focus area of information and communication technology (ICT) solutions. The award was...

-IANS Guwahati: The gurgling water flowing fast through a traditional canal system that has been revived in water-scarce parts of Assam has brought cheer to farmers who now look forward to a bumper harvest. After about 20 years, 42-year-old Rati Ranjan Mondal expects at least 450 mounds (about 18,000 kg) of rice from his 30 bighas (about 10 acres) of paddy field in this harvesting season, compared to about only 200 mounds...