-Live Mint It's been two years since the issue was flagged. However, there seem to be no clear answers New Delhi: On 14 August when the Union ministry of agriculture released the fourth advance estimate of crop production for 2013-14, it gave the country reason to cheer: in 2013-14 India had achieved a record food grain production of 264 million tonnes, beating the previous year's (2012-13) 257 million tonnes. These production figures,...

-The Hindu Corruption in India has undergone a qualitative shift from the days of licence Raj to the era of liberalisation. Opportunities for making money have come in handy for politicians, who were also dealing with a new political situation of fragmentation and instability. In the days leading to the 2008 Assembly election in Karnataka, slum-dwellers in Bangalore were startled to see small bundles flying in through their windows at night. The...

-Live Mint One of the Modi government's bigger initiatives will be to start implementing a three-decade-old plan to connect 30 rivers New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to make good on his promise to tackle India's water woes. He isn't the first Indian leader to make such a vow. Indira Gandhi was among the previous prime ministers who have tried, even though she was skeptical of mega dam projects. She...

-Live Mint Together with unpaid sugarcane arrears from mills, an errant monsoon has made the situation acute for farmers On the night of 28 August, at 1.30am, 40-year-old sugarcane farmer Rambeer Rathi shot himself in the head with a country-made revolver. A few days earlier, Rathi, of Tikri village in Baghpat district of western Uttar Pradesh, had sold two of his buffaloes to repay a bank loan of Rs.80,000 taken last year. But even...

-Deccan Chronicle We are faced with two crises on a planetary scale - climate change and species extinction. Our current modes of production and consumption, starting with the Industrial Revolution and aggravated by the advent of industrial agriculture, have contributed to both. If no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, we could experience a catastrophic 4°C increase in temperatures by the end of the century. But climate change is not just...