-Agencies/ United Nations World leaders accustomed to fine dining had a surprise on their plates on Sunday at the United Nations. Lunch made from food waste -- like “Landfill Salad” -- was served to about 30 world leaders who attended a global summit on sustainable development agenda. Chefs cooked up a lunch made entirely of food that would have ended up in garbage bins, hoping to highlight the extraordinary waste in modern...

-Business Standard The lens with which we report India's farm crisis has to change As we head for another year of trouble in the countryside, it is time to discard the enduring media tropes of rural distress. Like the image of a grizzled Indian farmer, framed against his parched field looking up at an unrelenting sky. Or the all too pervasive conflation of rural distress with farmer suicides. Such characterisation offers the...

-The Indian Express The politics of what these figures could mean or what they could be 'spun' to mean is something to ponder. As far as demographers go, Census 2011 brings good news on the population stabilisation front. And now we know that even across religions, across all communities, there is a decline in population growth rates. Alok Vajpeyi, of the Population Foundation of India who has studied the data in...

-Economic and Political Weekly Farmers' unions and political parties have been demanding the implementation of the Swaminathan minimum support price (cost plus 50%) to address agrarian crisis and farmers' distress. But they have not raised demands for the implementation of the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers, which have the potential to provide lasting solutions. Ranjit Singh Ghuman (ghumanrs@yahoo.co.uk) is a Nehru SAIL Chair Professor, Centre for Research in Rural and...

-The Hindu The PMJDY celebrates success on its website, but thousands of Marys remain outside the banking system. This won’t change unless the scheme alters both design and implementation A few months ago, when the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) was still being spoken of as a success for the largest number of accounts opened in a day, earning the government a Guinness world record, I visited the branch of a...