-The Telegraph In her recent book, Green Wars, the environmental journalist Bahar Dutt, writes: "The editor of a leading media house, everytime I pitched a green story, would invariably complain: ‘Environmentalism is stalling growth; all I am interested in is double-digit growth for this country.'" The idea that environmental protection and economic progress are at odds is widely held among India's elite. It is shared by newspaper editors, economists, businessmen, and, not...

-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Women staying in resettlements, slum clusters, unauthorized colonies, villages and on the outskirts of Delhi are at a greater risk of sexual violence. This comes through in a mapping exercise based on the details of callers on the 181 helpline for women in distress set up by the Delhi government after the Nirbhaya case. Police stations where the maximum cases were registered on the basis of...

-Deccan Herald Water, the sustainer of all forms of life on this planet, is too precious to be dispensed with. Water is wealth; nay water is life itself. It is the one commodity, barring air, which cannot be dispensed with. It is the sustainer of all forms of life on this planet --plant, animal and human. The demands on this precious but limited natural resource are ever increasing. A person will appreciate...