-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...

-Down to Earth System of crop intensification, specially in rice, has shown sizeable savings in water and seed usage. Yet its adoption has not spread despite incentives SIMPLE TECHNIQUES and manag-ement practices tend to be viewed with suspicion. In the age of input-intensive agriculture which calls for an array of machinery and a host of scientific props, a crop management system whose core basically is protecting the plant's roots to provide better...

-Down to Earth   The Badaun rape incident shows how vulnerable women are to sexual violence when there are no toilets in homes The shocking incident of gang rape and murder of two minor girls in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun district has drawn horrified reactions from leaders across the world. While most of the media attention has been on the apathy and insensitivity shown by the Akhilesh Yadav government and the police force, what...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: The World Health Organisation's (WHO) work of setting up norms and standards for production of medicines seems to be flawed by a fundamental conflict of interest. At the heart of its standard setting work is an entity the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) in which majority of the WHO member countries have no voting rights and which is dominated by pharmaceutical industry groups. This glaring...

-Tehelka   It is time India had a Good Samaritan law  It has been more than a year since the Nirbhaya rape case stirred the nation. Apart from the brutality inflicted upon the victim what else became a stigma for our society was the fact that no one came to the victim's rescue when the two were lying on the street naked and grievously injured. Of course people did cross them in luxurious...