-The Hindu   Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday directed the Department of Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board to upgrade safety measures at the nuclear facilities in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. At a special meeting to review the country's disaster preparedness in the light of the disasters the tsunami caused in Japan in March, Dr. Singh, who is also Chairman of the National Disaster Management...

-PTI   Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday directed upgradation of safety measures at the country's nuclear facilities to match the global standards as he reviewed the disaster preparedness in the wake of recent radiation scare in Japan. At a special meeting here, he asked the authorities concerned to look 'beyond design basis accident' while putting in place the safety measures at the nuclear installations. Singh took stock of the safety measures being...

This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...

Faced with soaring food prices for the second time in three years, senior United Nations experts today called for greater investment in agriculture from both the public and private sectors to increase smallholder productivity.   “Policy-related solutions are also required to increase the longer-term resilience of global agriculture to allow greater levels of supply to markets as demand grows,” UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Senior Economist Jamie Morrison told a meeting...

The Labour Bureau recently released its first report on employment in the country. Till now, job estimates have usually been available in the employment-unemployment surveys of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). The most recent of these is the 64th round (2007-08), preliminary results of which were reported in this column on 20 July. The 64th round estimates were disappointing, with annual employment growth during 2004-05 and 2007-08 at 0.8...