The recently concluded 15th Indian National Census is an exercise of staggering magnitude — by any standard. For perspective: the decennial Census covered an area of 3.27 million sq. kms, that included 640 districts, 5,767 tehsils, 7,742 towns and over 600 villages. Primary data on 1.2 billion people would be collected by over 2 million enumerators, specially trained for the purpose. The total cost of the exercise is conservatively estimated...

Indian agriculture needs Rs 1,08,000 crore to fight climate change in the next five years to ensure food for all at a reasonable price by 2020. To prevent food catastrophe, the agriculture ministry has asked the funds for implementing National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture under the Prime Minister's National Action Plan on Climate Change. Over 60% of the money will be spent on developing new technologies, crop varieties and new practices...

Let Aruna die? No, with her alive, there’s more power, media attention. Hence, the politics of mercy in medicine. Lucknow airport. Late ’90s. Khushwant Singh and I are waiting for our flights, we talk about Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee mentioning my book Once Was Bombay in a speech on collapsing cities. He suddenly asks, “You wrote that book on the woman who neither lives nor dies, you still see her?” I...

Rita Sharma, Secretary of India's National Advisory Council (NAC), has been appointed to a new commission on climate change to be chaired by Britain's chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington. The new Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, has been set up by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research's Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security program (CCAFS). Sharma is among 13 members of the commission which, in...

Prof Abhijit Sen, member of the Planning Commission, discusses Budget provisions related to the agriculture sector in an interview with Rajesh Bhayani and Sanjeeb Mukherjee. Sen feels, futures trading in essentials commodities like wheat and rice should not be allowed. According to him, India should follow China in having an agency for procuring commodities from the global market. There seems to a renewed focus in this Budget on ancillary items of...