-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's budget speech has promised a hundred smart cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...
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'Scaling back NREGA would force rural youth to move to bigger cities' -Sameer Arshad
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Mangal Singh's three sons were forced to work as daily wage labourers in Gujarat, hundreds of kilometres from their village in Rajasthan's Ajmer district, before the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was introduced. They were employed there for perilous digging of wells and stayed away from their home for months leaving their 82-year-old father to fend for himself. The NREGA came as a big boon for...
More »Karnataka's Smart, New Solar Pump Policy for Irrigation -Tushaar Shah, Shilp Verma, and Neha Durga
-Economic and Political Weekly The runaway growth in states of subsidised solar pumps, which provide quality energy at near-zero marginal cost, can pose a bigger threat of groundwater over-exploitation than free power has done so far. The best way to meet this threat is by paying farmers to "grow" solar power as a remunerative cash crop. Doing so can reduce pressure on aquifers, cut the subsidy burden on electricity companies, reduce...
More »Anand Grover, Senior advocate and former UN special rapporteur on the right to health speaks to Rema Nagarajan
-The Times of India India's intellectual property (IP) law has been hailed as one of the most progressive for safeguarding public interest, and several nations like Argentina, the Philippines and Brazil are looking to learn from it. Senior advocate and former UN special rapporteur on the right to health Anand Grover talks to Rema Nagarajan about the pressure the country is facing to change its IP laws, primarily from the US. *...
More »Women on the Edge of Land and Life -Manipadma Jena
-IPS News SUNDARBANS: November is the cruelest month for landless families in the Indian Sundarbans, the largest single block of tidal mangrove forest in the world lying primarily in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. There is little agricultural wage-work to be found, and the village moneylender's loan remains unpaid, its interest mounting. The paddy harvest is a month away, pushing rice prices to an annual high. For those like Namita Bera,...
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