-The Hindu Business Line Agriculture development and food security form the foundation of manufacturing growth. Modi must realise this Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s exhortation ‘Make in India’ would make perfect sense till we realise that by ‘making’ he means manufacturing. But could it be that his focus on manufacturing may come a cropper if we do not ensure that agriculture is placed permanently on a sound footing? The history of the great...

-New York Times Blog There’s poor, and then there’s ultrapoor. The ultrapoor are almost always women and largely found in Africa, South ASIa and to a lesser extent, parts of Latin America. They are most often rural. They work as maids or field laborers, often paid not with wages but in food scraps. They might have just one dress or sari, and must wash a part of it at a time...

-The Hindu The tragic Nepal quake is an opportunity to learn and understand the threats of great temblors. The Nepal earthquake of April 25 is the largest in the Himalayan region since the 1934 quake which measured 8.2 on the Richter scale and destroyed not only parts of central Nepal but also the plains of northern Bihar in India. Mahatma Gandhi, shaken by the Bihar tragedy, wrote in the Harijan that the...

-Livemint.com A strong El Nino will roil economies that are heavily dependent on agriculture, particularly India Singapore: In 2009, the El Nino brought the worst drought in four decades to India. It razed wheat fields in Australia and damaged crops across ASIa. Food prices surged. A closely watched forecast by Japan on Tuesday confirmed its return this year. A strong El Nino will roil economies that are heavily dependent on agriculture, particularly...

-The Hindu As the proposed amendments to the Juvenile Justice Act, 2000, passed in the Lok Sabha on May 7, faces the Rajya Sabha hurdle, several child rights experts have begun to challenge its premise for treating adolescents accused of heinous crimes on a par with adults. Their primary contention is that the bASIs for proposing such amendments for stringent action is flawed and unlikely to act as a deterrent. Victim, not...