-The Hindu Business Line Surpasses last year’s area for the first time New Delhi: The area under cultivation in the current rabi season for the first time this week surpassed that of corresponding period last year, according to the data released by the Agriculture Ministry on Friday. The total acreage under the rabi this year stood at 514.22 lakh hectares (lh), a marginal 1 per cent rise from 509.12 lh during the same...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Hundreds of transgender people gathered here on Sunday to criticise the NDA government's proposed definition of their gender as too similar to the Hindu concept of Ardhanarishwara in its over-reliance on physical attributes. They demanded that self-declaration and not medical screening be the accepted mode of gender identification. The transgender community sees itself as people whose gender identity (self-identification as man or woman or neither or both) runs counter...

-IANS New Delhi: If the farmers of Punjab and Haryana were to adopt smart techniques and use appropriate machinery, say experts, they won’t hog the headlines every winter for the wrong reasons — causing smog in the national capital because of stubble-burning. The Borlaug Institute of South Asia (BISA), a non-profit set up in 2011 to harness the latest technology in agriculture to improve farm productivity, has claimed to have reduced the...

-The Financial Express How about planting bamboo extensively along the banks of the Yamuna to sequester the carbon from Delhi’s vehicle emissions? According to the World Bank, India’s per person emission of carbon dioxide was 1,730 kg a year in 2014. Another website says this has risen to 1,900 kg in 2016. Bharathi Namby, a scientist, says it will take just five bamboo plants a year to make an Indian carbon-neutral,...

-Scroll.in Instead of accepting that millions of Indians need better nutrition, the organisation’s economists have argued that the Global Hunger Index is flawed. The Global Hunger Index put out by International Food Policy and Research Institute was released on October 2017 and tracks the state of hunger worldwide. India’s Global Hunger Index score is placed at 100 out of 119 countries. Instead of reflecting on the state of food security in India,...