By marrying traditional wisdom with scientific knowledge, India needs to create dynamic, location-specific content, and build the capacities of local people to make meaningful use of communication technologies for rural development, M.S. Swaminathan, chairperson the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), said here on Saturday. He was speaking at the ‘7th Convention of the Grameen Gyan Abhiyan – Rural Knowledge Movement' on Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Food, Health and Livelihood Security...

For past several weeks, thousands of farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Jharkhand have been left in the lurch. They had planted urd and til crops in a large acreage, and to their dismay no grain formation took place in the standing crop. Unable to bear the economic loss, at least four farmers have reportedly committed suicide. Thousands of farmers have been pushed deeper into economic distress....

After 16 days of intensive Statewide campaigning and 47 days of dharna, thousands of workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in Rajasthan scored a significant victory. Led by the Suchana Evum Rozgar Ka Abhiyan, they entered into an agreement with the State government under which they would be entitled to the prevailing minimum wage for their day's work. Describing this outcome as “historic,” social activist...

Fifty thousand jobs? The U.S. economy has lost that many every week, on average, for a straight 140 weeks since December 2007. Now that the media's gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes' that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.‘Twenty deals worth 10 billion dollars that create...

A lot has been said and written about the visit of Barack Obama, the President of USA to India. The corporate media was in the usual over-enthusiastic drive to bring to its readers and viewers all minute details about his visit from where he stayed and what he ate to how many warships, planes and cars accompanied him and how a whopping $200 million was spent per day for the...