-The Times of India CHENNAI: Poultry farmers can now afford to count their profits before their chickens hatch - and they are big, with chickens weighing on average twice as much as they did 50 years ago. The broiler chicken of today, a product of controlled breeding, weighs around 2.2kg as compared to 1.2kg before 1960, say veterinarians and chicken farm owners. Contract farming started in India in the early 1960s, taking...

-The Hindu NSSO urged to use time-use surveys to ascertain homemakers' economically productive activity Close to two out of every three Indian women are, in their prime working years, primarily engaged in unpaid housework, new NSSO data shows. This phenomenon, on the rise over the last decade, is least common in the southern and north-eastern States and most common in the northern States, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in particular. In data released on...

-The Hindu Tackling TB requires both strengthening the public sector and engaging the private sector Over 60 per cent of all Indians seek health care in the private sector according to India's last National Family Health Survey. This undoubtedly makes the private sector the largest provider of health services in India. The government health system, though vast and well-intentioned, continues to be overburdened with multiple challenges including long waiting hours, an ageing...

-The Hindu India needs a meaningful electricity service, not merely a wire connection to every household No one would believe that simply owning a smart phone would be enough to go online and get connected - one would still need a data connection for that to happen. Similarly, it is time that we added a similar level of service to define electrification, a focus area for the government. A decade ago, a village...

-Tehelka Despite the serious toll it takes on women's health, female sterilisation remains the most prevalent form of contraception in India. While memories of the 21 months of Emergency in 1975-77, imposed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, survives even today in the minds of Indian men as the fear of forced sterilisation, the country's population control policies have shifted over the years since then to target the politically less...