The railway ministry is helpless about the discomfort of railway passengers in reserved compartments who are outnumbered by passengers without tickets or with tickets meant for unreserved compartments   Last month, my friend’s daughter went on a trip to Corbett Park, which was organised by a Pune-based nature trail group. Although they had booked a Second Class (ordinary) reserved compartment, most of the 30-hour journey was spent in utter discomfort, with people...

-The Business Standard The government must prepare for below-normal monsoon A massive 30 per cent deficiency in the monsoon rainfall in June, coupled with an anticipated low precipitation in September, may add to the government’s difficulties in achieving its growth and fiscal deficit targets. Agriculture may not be the only victim of poor rainfall. Its contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) may have dipped to mere 15 per cent but it still...

-Down to Earth   Buy an Indian breed from Australia In June last year, we visited Malaysia on the invitation of the country’s oldest and most active consumer action group, The Consumer Association of Penang, to study the livestock production systems and to advise on how these can be transformed into more sustainable and less industrial farming systems. The past 40 years of aggressive industrial growth in Malaysia has seen small-scale peasant agriculture and...

-The Indian Express Prof M S S Pandian is not the sole dissenter as far as the Thorat committee’s recommendations on removal of cartoons from NCERT textbooks go. A number of academic experts roped in by the committee to review Political Science textbooks, which are at the centre of a controversy over “controversial” cartoons, also echoed views similar to Pandian and fully supported the cartoons. Set up in May following MPs’ objections...

-The Telegraph Weather scientists today predicted two weeks of active monsoon coming up but cautioned that without steady excess rainfall over the next eight weeks, the prospects of a normal monsoon this year will recede. Atmospheric conditions now appear favourable for two weeks of good rainfall across peninsular, central and northern India, but the activity is unlikely to be driven by typical monsoon season mechanisms such as depressions in the Bay of...