-The Times of India The parliamentary committee report on genetically modified (GM) organisms is an attempt to give a quiet burial to biotechnology in India. On behalf of the farmers of India, let me say that this report totally fails to reflect farmers' aspirations, and distorts the scientific significance of biotechnology - including genetic engineering - for the national economy. Instead, it echoes persistent canards by some environmental NGOs. Indian farming suffers...

-The Hindu A 2012 WHO study ranks India third — behind Myanmar and Bangladesh — among countries that fail to provide health cover to people. A 2011 study reported in The Lancet on ‘Healthcare and equity’ confirms this: every year, at least 39 million people here fall into poverty due to private out-of-pocket health expenditure. A vast majority of Indians do not have access to healthcare or essential drugs. By the...

-The Hindu The Union government on Monday told the Supreme Court that the Cabinet had cleared the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012. On August 24, the court pulled up the government for its callousness in not enacting a law to ban manual scavenging despite repeated assurances that it would come out with law to eliminate this heinous practice. The court wanted Additional Solicitor General Harin Raval to...

-The Hindu “Direct sowing is the way out in times of delayed water release and scarcity’’ As acres and acres of untilled land dot the tail-end of the Delta this year, there lays a tilled stretch of some 20 acres in Madapuram in Thiruthuraipoondi, bordering Nagapattinam, in the first and the only rains that lashed a few days ago. Seventy-six-year-old Oysul Karunai awaits the second spell to re-till his fields and broadcast the...

Two sets of government data on UPA government's most famous flagship programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), for which Rs. 33000 crore was earmarked in 2012-13 budget, provide widely different figures for several states, a feature which experts say is indicative of the corruption in the scheme and weakness of social audit or accountability. The government has increasingly relied on Management Information System (MIS) for monitoring NREGA at...