-Deccan Chronicle Pulses are truly the pulse of life: for the soil, for people and the planet. In our farms they give life to the soil by providing nitrogen. This is how ancient cultures enriched their soils. Farming did not begin with the Green Revolution and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. Whether it is the diversity-based systems of India, or the three sisters planted by the first nations in North America, or the...

-The Hindu However, it is among the highest consumers of smokeless forms of tobacco The preliminary findings from National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) released last week have given anti-tobacco campaigners a reason to smile. The survey has found that across the board, people — both men and women — in India are smoking less than they were a decade ago. Not just tobacco, even alcohol consumption among Indians has fallen. According to the...

-The Times of India BAREILLY: Used to the "comfortable fields", 90 families quietly demolished the toilets inside their house that was built under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), preferring to go back to defecating in the open. Authorities, who sent notices to these "defaulters", reckon there may be many more in India's rural and semi-urban belts doing this, unable to break decades of habit. A bunch of others had removed the...

-Livemint.com The takeaway from World Bank’s World Development Report is that there is no short cut for developing countries if they want to reap digital dividends New Delhi: Every day, there are 4 billion searches made on Google. That number is also the count of people who do not have access to the internet, according to the World Development Report (WDR) 2016, released by the World Bank on Thursday. The report,...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...