A United Nations-backed intervention involving cook stoves holds the promise of saving lives, uplifting health, improving regional environments, reducing deforestation, empowering local entrepreneurs, speeding development, and helping to stem global climate change. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has joined international efforts to dramatically boost the efficiency of some 3 billion cook stoves across Africa, Asia and Latin America, with the aim to protect women’s health and provide significant environmental...

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...

Banks will have to put in place a mechanism to verify that microfinance institutes (MFI) they finance do not charge exorbitant rates to the final borrowers. The finance ministry has asked banks to ensure that MFIs, whom banks are financing, do not lend at rates more than 24% — all inclusive rates — to the ultimate borrowers. Some banks have recently inserted a clause while lending to MFIs that they...

With a gas-guzzler of an economy, India had been spending tens of billions of dollars annually to import petroleum. And so its 2009 policy on biofuels mandated that by 2017, India would have enough biofuel production to cover at least 20 percent of the country’s oil consumption. The government has in fact been encouraging the cultivation of jatropha curcas for the past seven years, believing that would be the fastest way...

The government has launched a relief package, which will directly address the problems of the coffee growers, especially the small growers. Commerce and industry minister today flagged off the implementation of the `Coffee Debt Relief Package, 2010' by distributing the first batch of certificates to those small coffee growers whose loans have been waived under this package. This is the first time that the Government of India has come forward with...