Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force. According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17...

-IANS   Assam has been allocated $2.5 million by a UN body to help improve hygiene in rural areas, stressing on the economic gains that would follow "when people spend less money on preventable sanitation-related diseases". India is among 10 countries - seven African and three Asian - which have been identified for a five-year project. India loses $53.4 billion annually due to poor sanitation and hygiene, according to a recent report...

-The Times of India   Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan has done well to recast India`s position on climate change. In a signi-ficant departure from her predecessor, Jairam Ramesh, she has rightly emphasised equity as the key principle for future climate negotiations. Given that we cannot get to zero emissions right away with present-day technologies, the individual Indian should have as much right to carbon space as the individual American or European. At...

A survey conducted across nine states by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Allahabad University suggests that the much maligned system has revived, prodded by politics, good governance and the apex court. It also found the poor to be averse to cash transfers Kotri is a mid-sized village in Desuri block (Pali district, Rajasthan), about 15 kilometres away from the nearest large bus stand and market place. We walked to...

A report from a sample survey of the functioning of the public distribution system in 12 villages in two districts in Orissa, a state usually associated with a poor PDS. While there are errors in exclusion and inclusion of households covered, there has been a vast improvement in operation of the PDS; below the poverty line households seem to be receiving their entitlements. The households also express a strong preference...