-The Indian Express As both IARI and IISS continued refining their respective products, procurement under the soil health card scheme gathered steam when the government sanctioned setting up over 6,000 mini labs in 2016-2017. New Delhi: Despite objections raised by senior officers, a low-cost digital soil-testing technology developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), has been tweaked by a sister ICAR institute...

-The Hindu Business Line At an organic market in Odisha, middle-class consumers get to interact with the producers of their food and appreciate traditional knowledge systems One Sunday morning in January, I visited an organic produce market located amidst dense bougainvillea creepers and rows of trees, on the grounds of the six-decade-old Christian Hospital in Bissamcuttack, a town in western Odisha’s Rayagada district. In policy and public imagination, Odisha, particularly its western districts...

-The Indian Express Gorakhpur was only the acute manifestation of the chronic malady that ails our health system Outrage is a natural reaction to the terrible tragedy that cruelly crushed the lives of many innocent children in Gorakhpur. However, outrage is a wasted emotion if it is not accompanied by honest introspection to identify all contributory causes and followed by a cluster of corrective actions. The deaths of these children were caused...

-The Hindu Fifty years since the Green Revolution, the architect of the reform highlights the crisis facing Indian agriculture today It is 11 years since agronomist M.S. Swaminathan handed over his recommendations for improving the state of agriculture in India to the former United Progressive Alliance government, at the height of the Vidarbha farmer suicides crisis, but they are still to be implemented. To address the agrarian crisis and farmers’ unrest across...

-The Hindu Gorakhpur offers the only tertiary care centre for Japanese Encephalitis with 100 dedicated beds. * What is Japanese Encephalitis? Japanese Encephalitis (JE) is a mosquito-borne viral infection of the brain. There is, however, a debate about the origin of the disease and whether it is enteroviruses — caused by virus found in pigs and birds. There is no cure for JE. * Why only Gorakhpur? While Gorakhpur has a considerable burden of disease,...