Retirement at 60 means a relaxed life for most people. Not so for 70-year-old P Mukundan, managing director of Servals Automation Pvt Ltd, though. He did retire from his busy business life at 60 but chose to become a social entrepreneur after that. He started a social enterprise that is 'for-profit' but that touches the lives of those who live in rural areas all over the world. In 2002, Mukundan started manufacturing...

India's rural Innovators have proved that ordinary people are indeed capable of extraordinary inventions. Despite many constraints -- lack of education and severe cash crunch -- most of them have succeeded in using technology cost-effectively to build ingenious products. A washing-cum-exercise machine, hand operated water lifting device, portable smokeless stove, automatic food making machine, solar mosquito killer, shock proof converter, a floating toilet soap are few of the products on display...

Patients battling cancer, infections and mental illness joined a rally here today beseeching the government to reject a trade pact with the European Union that they fear will threaten the availability of inexpensive generic medicines in India. An estimated 2,000 people, many among them infected with HIV, walked along Delhi’s Parliament Street on a day when Indian and EU officials were negotiating a free trade agreement in Brussels. Health activists and lawyers...

When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well. Here in India, one of the 40 countries where SRI is now in use, poor tillers of the land are even helping propagate...

The initiatives under the programme include gearing up to meet new challenges in climate change, Public-Private partnership projects and programmes to make more people take to agriculture as a livelihood Looking to boost farm sector growth by more than 4%, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has chalked out a Rs2300-crore programme with focus on research and making farming a popular livelihood option. “Now every state is coming up well in the...