-Tehelka Tired of importing toxic vegetables from Tamil Nadu, Kerala seems to have started a movement in organic vegetable farming It seems vegetables have taken over from water in the ongoing rift between the south Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Having waged a relentless war over the sharing of water from the colonial Mullaperiyar dam for over three decades, the two states have now locked horns over the quality...

-Hindustan Times Three years ago, when representatives from Sukhbir Agro approached farmers in Punjab proposing they sell their farm waste to the company to generate bio-energy, no one believed them. “They proposed to buy our waste… We didn’t believe them,” said Amolak Singh, a farmer. However, as the farmers slowly came around to the idea the green benefits of this move became apparent. Every November, farmers in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and...

-The Hindu Despite growing clamour for pesticide-free produce, doubts persist about the capability of organic farming to generate high yields Kerala: Organic farming began finding momentum in Kerala since the unveiling of a policy in 2010 that set the goal of converting the entire agricultural production in the State to organic within 10 years. That policy announced by the then Left Democratic Front government is now being fast-tracked by the present United...

-The Hindu The demand for a reverse osmosis water filter device has been growing in my household. ‘Has our existing water filter stopped being friendly?’ has been my consistent query. ‘It is time we got a new one’ has been the standard response. Considered to be one of that generation to whom the ‘utility’ of a product carries a lot of meaning, listing the virtues of new technology has often been...

-Tehelka Last year’s Red Fort rhetoric has not been matched by action on the ground, with separate toilets for students remaining elusive as ever One part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on Independence Day this year can safely be predicted: the reeling out of statistics to prove that the Swachh Bharat campaign is sweeping the nation. The cleanliness drive launched on 2 October, 2014, was announced from the ramparts of the...