-Live Mint Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has rebuked an industry lobby for selectively using his recent comments on genetically modified cotton “to its advantage.” Ramesh said in a seminar on 12 June that there was a structural shift in India’s cotton economy and a comprehensive study was necessary to understand the relative roles of better irrigation, weather and the availability of different cotton varieties to understand how India had gone on...

-The Hindu The traditional ration cards will soon be replaced by smarts cards in Gurgaon as part of a pilot project by the Union Government in Haryana and Chandigarh to streamline the Public Distribution System. Announcing this at Gymkhana Club here, Financial Commissioner and Principal Secretary (Food & Supplies Department) Shakuntala Jakhu said that the task of preparing smart cards will be first taken up in the Pataudi block of Gurgaon. Besides...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...

-The Hindu It has made maximum number of requests to Google on content removal On a global scale, India made the maximum number of requests to Google through executive and police agencies for removal of content from the company's online services, but achieved a low rate of compliance from July to December 2011. By contrast, there were five court orders for removal of content, four of them on grounds of defamation, with...

-The United Nations Ahead of World Refugee Day, the United Nations refugee agency reported today that a record 800,000 people were forced to flee across borders last year, more than at any time since 2000. The new refugees are part of a total of 4.3 million people who were newly displaced last year, owing to a string of major humanitarian crises that began in late 2010 in Côte d'Ivoire, and followed by...