-The Business Standard The tragedy involving the death of children in a Bihar school should reinforce recent efforts to improve the programme, notes Amarjeet Sinha. The sad loss of 23 innocent lives after consuming hot cooked meals in a school in Bihar has rightly shocked and angered people. The highly poisonous pesticide monocrotophos found in children's food and a headmistress overlooking the cook and the children's protests about the oil and not...

-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...

-The Hindu Stockholm convention approves non-chemical as well as chemical alternatives THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Conference of Parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, meeting in Geneva, approved non-chemical as well as chemical alternatives to endosulfan on Thursday. The non-chemical alternatives were proposed in a significant departure from past practice. The evaluation of non-chemical alternatives, as accepted by the conference, consists of an ecosystem-based approach to pest management as well as technical interventions. C....

-First Post Predictably, the recommendation by an experts’ panel appointed by the Supreme Court  - that trials of genetically modified (GM) crops should be halted for 10 years – has stirred a hornet’s nest. Such a moratorium would include ongoing trials and the court rejected it. This follows on the heels of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture’s 492-page report published in August which asked for the banning of GM food crops...

-The Hindu A recent survey in the Sunderbans region of West Bengal reveals an alarming trend of rising mental health problem among women Everyday, when Badal, a sturdy young man of Sunderbans returns home at dusk, he finds his mother, Kamala, sitting placidly in the verandah, staring into the distance with strangely unseeing eyes. The house, otherwise, is abuzz with activity. His daughter is bringing in the cows, his sons are clamouring...