-The Business Standard The cracker industry in Sivakasi is estimated to be worth about Rs 3,500 cr B Bagyalakshmi, S Mahalakshmi and K Sankaralingam have two things in common. All used to work in firecracker and matchbox making units at Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu. However, they rebuilt their lives after studying at the National Child Labour Project (NCLP)'s special training centres, run with the financial assistance from Central and state governments. While...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...

-The Hindu In Indo-Gangetic plains there may be a 50 per cent fall in wheat area New Delhi: Rural poverty in parts of Asia could be exacerbated due to negative impacts from climate change on rice production, and a general increase in food prices and the cost of living, says the report of working group two of the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. Launched on Thursday, the report Climate...

-PTI In August last year, Parliament was informed that Maharashtra had witnessed 37 farmer suicides due to agrarian reasons The number of farmer suicides in Maharashtra is higher compared to other states in the country, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said today. "As compared to other states, farmers suicides are maximum in Maharashtra," Singh said without disclosing the details, on the sidelines of a book launch here. Asked about the reasons for growing...

-The Hindu Agroforestry promotes productive cropping environments, prevents deforestation, protects watersheds and enables agricultural land to withstand extreme weather events Growing trees on farms is a triple-win strategy for combating simultaneously the challenges of increasing food production, mitigating greenhouse gases and adapting to climate change. It is an instrument of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), catapulted to centre-stage by President Obama's launch of the Global Alliance for CSA at the World Climate Summit on...