-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: India will soon have separate guidelines for eye donations and transplantation. The Union health ministry, in its bid to augment eye donations in the country, has set up a committee, headed by the chief of R P Eye Centre at AIIMS, Dr R V Azad, to frame new rules which will separate eye retrieval and transplant from organ donations. "Unlike a heart, kidney and other organs,...

-The Hindu Mandya: In a single biggest raid in recent years against the "bonded labour system" in the State, Revenue and Police officials on Thursday raided a stone quarry unit on the outskirts of Bangalore and rescued 19 migrant labourers. Among them nine are minors. The rescued labourers are from Mahbubnagar district in Andhra Pradesh. They alleged that they had been working since past 13 years as bonded labourers at the quarry,...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Instead of simplifying the process for organ donation, the Centre seems to be imposing more bureaucratic hurdles and adding to the trauma of donors' family members. A draft of fresh national guidelines for organ transplant says forensic departments of government hospitals will play a pivotal role in organ donation. The problem, say experts, is that grieving relatives may have to wait longer-first, for busy, overworked forensic experts...

-The Hindu   With her passing, Indian feminism has lost one of its earliest icons Three years ago, almost to the day, when we launched Vina Mazumdar's memoir, Memories of a Rolling Stone, the room at the Habitat Centre in Delhi was packed to overflowing. Resplendent in her beautiful silk, Vinadi, as she was known to everyone around her, smiled her way through the evening as bureaucrats, academics, politicians, educationists, feminists and others...