-The Times of India HYDERABAD: The tall claims of the successive governments notwithstanding, Devadasi system continues to flourish in rural areas of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. According to a report submitted by one-man commission recently, the two states together have about 80,000 Devadasi women. This was much over the estimated number of the AP social welfare commission, which put the figure at 24,273. A one-man commission headed by Justice Raghunath Rao, a...

-Business Standard On the basis of resource-efficiency, pollution and compliance, state-owned power generation firms fare the worst A staggering 90 per cent of coal-based thermal power plants in India fare unsatisfactorily on the environmental front, shows a recent analysis. While state-owned power generation companies are among the worst performers, plants owned by private firms have performed better on environmental and energy parameters. In a report released by the Centre for Science...

-The Hindu Business Line Though migration of labour from the east has helped revive the plantations in southern India, questions remain on the long-term implications, Vishwanath Kulkarni reports As the harvest season starts in Coorg, Karnataka, coffee planter MC Kariappa has a lot of issues to contend with - productivity, weather and, the biggest worry of all in recent times, paucity of labourers. So when a dozen labourers from Assam landed at...

-Down to Earth Madhya Pradesh's order to destroy crops cultivated using sewage has triggered a debate over the age old practice of using wastewater for irrigation RESIDENTS OF Kararia, Barkhera, Pathani and Shahpur villages in Madhya Pradesh's capital district Bhopal will soon lose the vegetables they have been growing. The loss will not be due to some disease or untimely rain. The plants will be destroyed by the government because sewage water...

-The Indian Express ONE of the late R.K. Laxman's best cartoons from the mid-1960's portrays a smiling food minister looking out of a window at a heavy monsoon downpour saying, "This year we can tell the Americans to go to hell." Fifty years ago, a good monsoon meant that that year, India was not dependent on food aid and wouldn't have to go hat in hand to the Americans for food...