-The Telegraph Guwahati: Union tourism secretary Pervez Dewan has asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to remove a sentence in a Class X geography textbook that reads tourism has not been encouraged in the Northeast "for strategic reasons". For Kavya Barnadhya Hazarika, a Class XI student of Maharishi Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School here, it's a lesson learnt that persistence pays. Kavya had written to both President Pranab...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The Cabinet will on Thursday decide on raising natural gas prices for the first time in three years even as the move faces stiff resistance as it would result in rise in electricity tariff and fertiliser cost. The oil ministry's proposal to price all domestically produced natural gas as per a complex international hub and Imported LNG-based formula suggested by the Rangarajan panel is listed as item number 8...

-The Indian Express Why the proposed national minimum wage is the wrong answer to questions of unemployment and poverty The recent national labour conference - a trade union love fest with little real employer participation - demanded a national minimum wage. The trade union demand is a predictable positioning of narrow self-interest as national interest but the government's acceptance of their demand is unfair, delusional and economically stupid. Unfair, because it pampers a...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-IANS NEW DELHI: While thousands have suffered the fury of floods in Uttarakhand, experts say worse tragedies may strike the region unless the rampant violation of the Himalayan state's sensitive ecology is checked. Environmentalists blamed the volume of the disaster on the dams, indiscriminate construction, uncontrolled tourism and ignorance about the fragile ecology of the area. Experts have called for an immediate halt to unchecked tourism, especially religious tourism, and haphazard construction. "The...