-Hindustan Times When Prime Minister Narendra Modi met some prominent billionaires last month, seeking quicker job-creation and investments, many industrialists complained that falling rural demand for goods was rocking their boats too. Incomes of India’s 833 million mostly poor rural population – a huge market for all kinds of goods – are barely rising and it is a cause for worry. Farming contributes just 15% of India’s $2 trillion economy, but half...

-Hindustan Times In August this year, whiteflies -- a notorious pest -- bumbled through vast tracts of Punjab’s cotton fields, destroying a sizeable chunk of the crop in the state. These insects, which slurp on juicy, tender bolls, seemed to have inflicted heavy losses, sparking a serious farm crisis in India’s agricultural powerhouse in a decade. A back-to-back drought meant farmers grew more cotton, a hardy crop that requires less water to...

-The Hindu In the run-up to the U.N. climate summit in Paris in December, Indian environmental NGO, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), released a report which came down heavily on the U.S. — the second largest emitter of CO2 globally — for not doing enough about climate change, while preaching to other countries, including India, to “act.” In its report ‘Captain America U.S. climate goals: a reckoning,’ the CSE concluded that...

-The Hindu The idea of attacking poverty by increasing mobile connectivity in a country that ranks 55 in the Global Hunger Index is just fantasy Interviewer: What would you regard as the most outstanding and significant event of the last decade? Siddhartha: The… war in Vietnam, sir. Interviewer: More significant than landing on the moon? Siddhartha: I think so, sir. — “Pratidwandi” (The Adversary), 1970 The most fundamental debate for our youth is the choice between Android,...

-The Indian Express An analysis of NCRB’s prison data of states with significant Muslim population also revealed that in some states the ratio of percentage of Muslim undertrials in jails to that of the population is almost 2:1. Muslims make up for over 21 per cent of all undertrials lodged in various jails in the country even as their population is just over 14 per cent of the country’s total population,...