-The Telegraph Kolkata: The state government today set February 28 as the deadline for distributing Aadhaar cards among all Bengal residents, prompting many to wonder about the feasibility of covering over six crore people in little over five-and-a-half months. Providing Aadhaar numbers to all citizens above the age of five is the precursor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's dream project of rolling out a direct benefit-transfer scheme, replacing the leak-prone subsidy system. The...

-Outlook Gandhinagar: A more stringent safety regime will be in place for genetic engineering in agriculture or medical sciences once the National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority (NBRA) Bill is cleared by Parliament, a senior official said here today. "The NBRA bill has been introduced in Parliament and being debated. Once it (bill) is cleared, a more stringent safety regime shall be in place for genetic engineering, be it in the agriculture space or...

-The Telegraph Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee government today announced a scheme to allow big private investors to directly procure farm produce - a segment that Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee could not liberate from the stranglehold of the Forward Bloc. The scheme titled Brihat Krishak Bazar Yojana, which loosely translates into mega farmer market programme, seeks to "connect the local market to high-growth demand centres" and weed out middlemen. The project will allow private developers to...

-PTI AGARTALA: India's northeastern state of Tripura achieved the first position in literacy with 94.65 per cent, beating Kerala (93.91 per cent), Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar announced here on Sunday. "Tripura jumped to first position among the states of the country in literacy from the 12th position in the 2001 census and the fourth position in the 2011 census," Sarkar said at a function on the occasion of International Literacy Day. Sarkar...

-PTI Kolkata: 49 children have died in the city's state-run BC Roy Children's Hospital over the last seven days. The largest referral children's hospital in the eastern region had been in the news for a large number of crib deaths in the past few years. "49 child patients have died in our hospital in the last seven days, and almost all of them were brought in a critical condition," hospital sources said. They said...