-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Traffic jams, parking problems, app-based cabs, online shopping and fast-spreading metro networks have resulted in car sales starting to fall in big cities, something many hoped for but few expected to become a reality. City-specific numbers accessed by TOI from industry sources show car sales dropped 20 per cent in Mumbai in 2017-18—97,274 cars sold during the year versus 1.22 lakh in the previous year. Bangalore,...

-Livemint.com India’s weather office has forecast a normal monsoon. Bountiful rains in the June-to-September period are critical for about 800 million Indians who depend directly or indirectly on farming New Delhi: Gangabhishan Thaware, a 53-year-old farmer from the drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra, took an unusual step in July last year. Thaware and his fellow villagers had toiled on their fields and spent thousands of rupees on seeds and fertilizers, hopeful...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Union health ministry has banned the sale of formulations with oxytocin through retail chemists and restricted domestic manufacture to public SECtor companies amid concerns about the clandestine manufacture and sale of the drug, believed to be misused in the dairy SECtor. The new rules come into effect from July 1. The government has also banned the import of oxytocin and its formulations, but public and private SECtor...

  There is some bad news for the world’s largest democracy. Thanks to the vitiated atmosphere induced by troll attacks on scribes on social media, among other things, the country's World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) ranking has fallen two places to 138th position.   Among 180 countries, India ranked 136th last year with a score of 42.94. However, in 2018 it attained 138th position with a score of 43.24 according to the...

-The Indian Express RSF mentions that government was using proSECutions to “gag journalists who are overly critical” of it, invoking, among other SECtions, sedition charges, which are punishable by a life-term in jail. New Delhi: On the account of “deadly threat” from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “nationalism”, India has slipped down two ranks compared to last year in the Reporter’s Without Border’s (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF) World Press Freedom Index 2018....