-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: India will soon have separate guidelines for eye donations and transplantation. The Union health ministry, in its bid to augment eye donations in the country, has set up a committee, headed by the chief of R P Eye Centre at AIIMS, Dr R V Azad, to frame new rules which will separate eye retrieval and transplant from organ donations. "Unlike a heart, kidney and other organs,...

-The Economic Times India's GDP growth has almost halved from 9.2% in 2010-11 to 5% in 2012-12. Major problems include a high current account deficit, high fiscal deficit, and lack of bank credit for small and medium enterprises. All three problems can be mitigated substantially by one single measure - reducing excess food stocks. So say Ashok Gulati and Surabhi Jain, chairman and joint director respectively of the Commission for Agricultural...

-The Hindu     ‘We have cashew on over 150 acres in the district now' Bidar: Vidya Sagar Patil still remembers the reactions of his neighbours when he decided to plant cashew on his family's land at Malchapur four years ago. "They thought I was mad. Some were blunt enough to tell me to my face, while others just gave me a weird look. After a while I stopped reasoning it out with them and...

-The Hindu     There is little demonstrated evidence of health benefits from access to ‘improved' stoves and clean fuels Around three billion of the world's poorest people have to burn firewood, animal dung, crop Waste and coal to cook food and heat homes, using traditional stoves and open fires. The health-damaging smoke that results is estimated to cause some four million premature deaths each year, principally of women and children. Although many governments, multinational...