A prolonged dry spell has left the epicentre of farmer suicides in crisis again Yavatmal: Recent rains have given Vidarbha a fresh look, but they have done little to ease the misery of thousands of farmers in these districts at the eastern edge of Maharashtra as they live with the reality of parched fields and mounting debt. As election fever grips the state, farmers in Yavatmal and nearby districts swear...

Global economic and financial crisis (2007-2008) coupled with food and fuel crises (2006-2008) has pushed the number of undernourished in the world to 1.02 billion during 2009, This has happened despite international food commodity prices declining from their earlier peaks, finds a newly released report of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, www.fao.org) titled: The State of Food Insecurity in the World Report 2009: Economic Crises-Impacts and Lessons Learnt....

In Maharashtra, where issues hurl themselves at you, the Opposition failed to mount a strong campaign on a single one of them. The front rows of the Mumbai-Nagpur flight are usually the province of the political class: MLAs to MPs, ministers and fixers. This time, though, quite a few of the occupants were celebrities: television and film stars, major and minor, middling and mediocre. It wasn’t the T-20 cricket match in...

Age was no deterrent to his passion and determination. Till he lost to cancer on September 12, Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug relentlessly fought his arch enemy, the rust fungus, which had engaged him since he first landed in Mexico in 1944 to breed shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which were to liberate the world from hunger over next decades. His brilliance of pulling India out of ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence is well known....

India ranks 134th out of 182 countries, the same as in 2006, in the 2009 Human Development Report released on Monday. China registers the largest gain in rank, moving up seven places to finish at 92. The United States dropped one place to end at 13. The HDR ranks countries on the Human Development Index (HDI), measuring their progress on three key indicators — education, life expectancy and income measured by...