-The Telegraph Influential Lingayat and Hindu seers say they will brook no deviation from a purely vegetarian diet for children Bangalore: A 14-year-old Karnataka schoolgirl has told powerful seers opposing boiled eggs in midday meals they don’t understand the problems of the poor and have no business telling them what they should eat. In a video clip widely shared on social media, Anjali, a Class VIII student of MNM Government Girls School at...

-TheWire.in More than 900 dead bodies have reportedly been buried along the river in Unnao alone last week. New Delhi: The devastating second wave of the coronavirus pandemic is slowly turning into a horror story in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. Days after Bihar’s Buxar district authorities said that at least 71 bodies of suspected COVID-19 victims from the neighbouring eastern UP were washed ashore at the banks of the river Ganga...

-The Hindu 12-member team to go beyond present crisis, prepare road map for transparent budgeting with States The Supreme Court has constituted a 12-member National Task Force to streamline and ensure the “effective and transparent” allocation of liquid medical oxygen on a “scientific, rational and equitable basis” to States and Union Territories fighting COVID-19. The apex court had expressed its dissatisfaction at the Centre’s earlier “oxygen-for-bed” formula. This “rough-and-ready” arrangement, as the court...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org With no industrial activity and low wages in agriculture, men from Bhagabanpur in Maldah district go to work in faraway places like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, just to survive and send money home Rehna Bibi didn’t think much when her phone call to her husband, Anas Shaikh, failed to connect at 10.30 a.m.on February 7, 2021. They had spoken less than two hours ago. “His grandmother had died that morning,” says...

-The Indian Express People do not want to risk their homes, fields, pastures, forests and rivers in the name of development. Most of such development work in the Himalayas is being carried out without an understanding of its fragility, seismicity, glacial behaviour, climatic changes and their collective destructive power. The flash floods due to the burst of an artificial lake created by a huge landslide (rock, frozen mud and ice) in Rishi...