-The Times of India NEW DELHI: India's march towards being an economically stable nation is threatened not just by global financial issues. Poor health indicators pose an equally big threat. The Harvard School of Public Health has, in a study on economic losses due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), estimated that the economic burden of these ailments for India will be close to $6.2 trillion for the period 2012-30, a figure that is...

-The Hindu New IPCC report raises questions over urgency or seriousness of climate change The climate has not been warming over the past 15 years at rates predicted earlier, the latest report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be released September end, is going to say. The report is also going to accept that carbon dioxide gas concentration in atmosphere may not be as potent in causing global temperature...

-The Hindu Biomass cookstoves and solar lighting improve the health of women and are creating business models that empower them Around the world three billion people have no access to modern cooking fuels. They depend mostly on direct burning of solid biomass for cooking and heating. The smoke from these rudimentary stoves causes some four million deaths annually, destroys millions of tonnes of crops and leads to global warming and large-scale regional...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Prime Minister on Friday called for a political consensus on "more difficult reforms", indicating that the government was considering a cut in fuel subsidy, which would mean higher petrol and diesel prices, and bringing in measures to curb gold imports. Making a statement in the Lok Sabha on the current economic situation, Manmohan Singh admitted that the current account deficit had gone up sharply and...

-The Hindu The move to redefine 'handloom' is in the interest of powerloom operators who will be able to corner benefits meant for weavers "Any loom, other than powerloom; and includes any hybrid loom on which, at least one process for weaving requires manual intervention or human energy for production." (The new definition of handloom proposed by Ministry of Textiles) The textile industry in India comprises three sectors - the mill, the powerloom and...