-India Today Following the withdrawal of a subsidy for LPG cylinders by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry, the Human Resource Development Ministry will soon begin reimbursing Rs.752 crore that was spent on preparing mid-day meals in schools using unsubsidised cylinders. The Finance Ministry's Department of Expenditure had last year given "inprinciple" approval for meeting an additional expenditure of Rs.752 crore to be incurred during 2012-13 for procuring LPG cylinders after the...

-The Indian Express All the extra money that you spent on installing CFL lights in your homes, in buying new LED television sets, and on five-star rated air-conditioners and refrigerators instead of three-star ones, have proved to be worthwhile, having resulted in huge energy savings for India in the last decade. Between 2000 and 2011, a total of 791 million tonnes of oil equivalent energy was saved, thanks to measures like...

-Down to Earth Women of a Maharashtra hamlet give husbands an ultimatum-build toilets or go without food TOILETS ARE not an issue over which one sees agitations every day. And when it comes to women agitating against husbands, it may well be an unprecedented situation. Yet, the women of Amgaon, a tiny village in Wardha district of Maharashtra, did just that. On June 24, they staged a choolband, or no-cooking protest, forcing...

-The Hindu   Obesity among children due to rampant consumption of junk food has reached epidemic proportions. With India already in the grip of this dangerous global trend, the government needs to remove its blinkers on the processed food industry One of the first declarations of the newly elected government in June was a proposal to ban unhealthy or junk food (defined as food high on fat, sugar and salt) in school...

-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...