-TheWire.in Swayam Shikshan Prayog, a Maharashtra-based non-profit, is helping women become clean energy pioneers, in an initiative that has earned them a UN climate award. Varsha Pawar of Osmanabad district in Maharashtra was like any other housewife till she started selling solar cook stoves and lamps in her neighbourhood a little over a year ago. Life was never the same again. Today, she is the sarpanch (village council chief) of Tirth Khurd,...

-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...

-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-The Hindu Business Line By allowing children to work in family enterprises, amendments to the Child Labour Act have made them more vulnerable to exploitation. Tracking the issue will be more difficult, writes Preeti Mehra When the two houses of Parliament put their stamp on a few amendments to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 a couple of months ago, they also signed away the dignity of children and the...

-The Hindu Industry had opposed the move as it may hurt small factories financially New Delhi: The centre is reconsidering a plan to widen the social security net for workers by bringing more factories under the provident fund coverage. The Cabinet Secretariat has pointed out a few contradictions in the Labour Ministry’s proposal to amend the Employees’ Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions Act of 1952, senior labour ministry officials said. The Labour Ministry had...