-Hindustan Times Handbook of Forest Conservation Act, 1980, now reads: “Prior recommendation of Standing Committee of NBWL under the provisions of Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 shall be obtained, if required, for taking developmental activities in/over an area falling within eco sensitive zones.” Railway projects, small-scale development works involving construction over less than 20,000 square metres, and under-25 MW capacity hydropower plants will not require approval from the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL)...

-Hindustan Times The study is significant as it reviewed the under sediment cores derived from the Krishna Godavari basin of the Bay of Bengal to understand how the monsoon rainfall pattern has changed in the past 2,000 years. Warming of Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean is likely to weaken the India monsoon further in the near future, which could be accentuated by land mass changes across the country, says a...

-Hindustan Times The dire projections of an acute food shortage came to the fore on the completion of four months of lockdown restrictions, which were imposed in end-March in a bid to prevent the spread of the raging coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak and the despite the largesse from the state government for 94 lakh beneficiaries between April and June. Bhubaneswar: A survey of pension beneficiaries from the four migration- prone districts of...

-Hindustan Times The state government launched ‘Rozgar Setu’ web portal on June 10 to bring the migrant labourers and employers/job providers on a common platform so that the latter could choose the workforce as per their requirement. Bhopal: Nearly 5 percent of 7.30 lakh migrant labourers have got jobs and the biggest employers of these 35,000 odd labourers are village panchayats, not the private sector, shows Madhya Pradesh government’s data. The state government...

Poisonous snakebites have killed more than a million Indians in the last two decades, finds a recently published article entitled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study. Published in the open access journal elifesciences.org, the research-based study has found that the country accounts for nearly half the total number of annual deaths in the world caused by snakebite envenoming. Who are the...