A tobacco retail shop in a Gujarat town While the Gujarat government may claim to have decided to begin a “tobacco free Gujarat” campaign in 2011 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the state chief minister, yet, latest available data suggest that as many as 51.4 per cent of men and seven per cent of women in the state use any form of tobacco – it can be smoking cigarettes, bidis, cigars pipes, or hookas, chewing pan masalas with or without tobacco, use of gutkha or pan masala with tobacco, or use of khaini or snuff.

Bill Gates World-renowned environmental leader and ecologist Dr Vandana Shiva has expressed concern that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corporation, has joined the bandwagon of “a poison cartel of three" – Monsanto and Bayer, Syngenta and ChemChina, Dow and DuPont – all of whom allegedly have “roots in Hitler’s Germany and finding chemicals to kill people”.

Coal India, with an annual coal production of 538.8 million metric tonnes, ranks No 1 of all the world’s coal producing units. Revealing this, a high-profile civil society  report , “Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2019” has said that Coal India is among 16 top coal producing companies 16 key companies “exposed to potential risk due to human rights and climate liability.”

The Lokshahi Bachao Andolan, a Gujarat-based civil rights organization headed by former BJP chief minister Suresh Mehta, has alleged that the state government has changed the minimum acceptable standard of drinking water from 500 milligrams per liter of TDS to 2,000 milligrams, risking the health of crores of people of Gujarat. Pointing out that the permissible limit for water has been changed in “10 of the 13 norms”, addressing media, its members said, “The total hardness has been increased from 200 to 600.”

In a major embarrassment for Gujarat model, of the 21 samples taken by officials of the state government's environmental watchdog Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) in two villages of Vadodara district and analyzed by its laboratory in Gandhinagar, the state capital, to find out pollution level in groundwater, 16 were assessed as highly contaminated – these were, in fact, found to be discharging reddish, brownish, reddish, or yellowish water.

Justice Joseph, Gagan Sethi Did the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) try to stop a pre-arranged civil society meet at Gujarat University, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, held on the occasion of the 89th anniversary of Dandi march to highlight the importance of nonviolence at a time when the country is allegedly facing violent religious and caste divisions? Organised by Delhi-based civil rights body India Inclusive, and called India Unites Convention on Nonviolence and Harmony, well-known human rights activist Shabnam Hashmi told the meet even as it was about to begin, "PMO rang up to say this meeting should not happen. It is not known what is there to be afraid of from such a small gathering." Hashmi named one of the organisers of the meet as the source of information about PMO. Speaking on the occasion, former Supreme Court judge Kurian Joseph regretted sharp erosion of values for which Gandhi stood for -- unity in diversity. Also pointing towards lack of respect for constitutio...

Obtaining the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) board of directors  minutes  “approving” the demonetization decision of the Government of India (GoI) 28 months after he made a Right to Information (RTI) plea, senior RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak regrets, these do not have any mention of “the black money reports submitted by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP, an autonomous research institute under India's Ministry of Finance) and two other research institutions.”

Atanu Chakraborty, JN Singh, AK Vijay Kumar The three-year old tug-of-war between AK Vijay Kumar, a non-IAS babu known for his rough-and-tough ways, and Atanu Chakraborty, a Gujarat cadre industry-friendly IAS bureaucrat, has come to an end following intervention by Gujarat chief secretary JN Singh and two other bureaucrats.

When the whole world is going to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, the current scenario of girls’ education in India is very precarious. Nearly 40% of adolescent girls aged 15-18 are not attending any educational institution, said Ambarish Rai, National Convener, Right of Education (RTE) Forum, has said.

The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has said that India's unemployment rate in February 2019 was 7.2 per cent, higher than 7.1 per cent in January 2019 and much higher than the 5.9 per cent in February 2018 or 5 per cent in February 2017. Releasing latest figures, the top consulting agency has said, simultaneously, the labour participation rate fell from 43.2 per cent in January 2019 to 42.7 per cent in February. "A year ago, in February 2018, the labour force participation rate was 43.8 per cent. Since then, this ratio has slipped to a low of 42.5 per cent. It seems to be stabilising within the range of 43.2 and 42.5 per cent", CMIE  says , adding, however, "The most worrying part of the monthly labour participation rate series is that it has been systematically lower than the corresponding levels a year ago." According to CMIE, "The falling labour participation rate implies that lower and lower proportion of the working age population is willi...

High-resolution satellite images, which are claimed to have been reviewed by a top US expert, are said to suggest that "a religious school run by Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in northeastern Pakistan appears to be still standing days after India claimed its warplanes had hit the Islamist group's training camp on the site and killed a large number of militants." Referring to these images, top news agency Reuters  says , "The images produced by Planet Labs Inc, a San Francisco-based private satellite operator, show at least six buildings on the madrasa site on March 4, six days after the airstrike", adding,  "Until now, no high-resolution satellite images were publicly available. But the images from Planet Labs, which show details as small as 72 cm (28 inches), offer a clearer look at the structures the Indian government said it attacked." According to Reuters, "The image is virtually unchanged from an April 2018 satellite photo of the facility. There are...

A senior expert with the conservative US thinktank American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, has regretted that India is behind China in Asian arms race, and it's "high defense-spending totals mask the weakness of its weapons systems" as "the threat is growing".

A new World Bank report ranks India 125th in its Women, Business and the Law (WBL) index among 187 economies it seeks to analyse across the globe. The report's main aim claims to be to "gain new insight into how women’s employment and entrepreneurship choices are affected by legal gender discrimination. On a scale of 100, India's score is 71.25, worse than the global average of 74.71.