-The Economic Times Kulvinder Gill, professor of breeding and genetics at the Washington State University in the US, describes himself as a dreamer and an optimist. One of his dreams is to make sure food production does not decline over the next few decades, when increasing temperatures act on the yields of major crops. Specifically, he is beginning a project with six other organisations in India to make wheat less sensitive to...

-The Hindu The Rajasthan State Commission for Protection of Child Rights is developing a protocol for elimination of child labour with its contents devoted to various aspects of child trafficking, children being forced into hazardous occupations and rehabilitation of rescued child labourers. Panel chairperson Deepak Kalra said at a workshop on child labour here on Monday that the protocol would be submitted to Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot with request for urgent action...

-The Hindu The petition against the Ambedkar-Nehru cartoon, published in The Hindu (“Humour is by no means exempt from prejudice”, June 8, 2012), makes for sad reading. Sad, because it bears the signatures of some of our best scholars, universally admired for their rigorous scholarship, who nevertheless chose to sign a petition short on facts. The petition asks the NCERT's Textbooks Review Committee to “reconsider the Ambedkar cartoon (and possibly other such...

-IANS Global warming is diminishing the Chhota Shigri glacier in the Pir Panjal ranges of Himachal at 0.67 metres a year, report French and Indian researchers.  The study, jointly supported by the department of science and technology, India's space agency ISRO and the Indo-French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research, concluded that the glacier mass was thinning more rapidly this century.  The researchers, including those from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University and glaciologists...

It relates to the anti-Hindi agitation in the State; politicians say it depicts the student agitators in a poor light Just as the controversy over a cartoon on B.R. Ambedkar in a textbook prepared by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is settling down, another row has erupted over a cartoon in a class XII Political Science text book of the NCERT. The cartoon relates to the anti-Hindi...