-Outlook As government seeks to roll out the food law, Finance Minister P Chidambaram today sought to raise total subsidies on fuel, food and fertilisers marginally to over Rs 2.46 lakh crore in the 2014-15 fiscal. Government has increased the food subsidy by a whopping Rs 23,000 crore to Rs 1,15,000 crore for 2014-15 fiscal mainly for implementation of the National Food Security law. According to the interim Budget proposals, subsidy bill on...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: Maharashtra government disclosed that it had incurred a expenditure of Rs 3.71 crore on probe panel of much-hyped Adarsh Housing Society scam in Mumbai. This led to rest the speculations about total amount spent on the scam report drafted by Justice JA Patil and former bureaucrat P Subramaniam. Earlier, it was speculated that the government had spent Rs7 crore on the panel constituted in 2011 by...

-Down to Earth Four-day world congress on agroforestry in Delhi pushes for accelerating growing trees on farms for sustainable agriculture and mitigating climate change impacts In what is seen as a ground-breaking move, India has become the first nation in the world to adopt an agroforestry policy. The National Agroforestry Policy, which deals with the practice of integrating trees, crops and livestock on the same plot of land, was launched February 10,...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The UPA government is expected to announce a minor increase in the outlays for social sector schemes, while leaving the overall Plan expenditure for 2014-15 around the same level as the Budget estimates for the current fiscal. In what may be seen as shunning populism for a more pragmatic fiscal plan, finance minister P Chidambaram is in fact expected to penalize several poor performers, who...

-The Business Standard Chulhas - cook stoves of poor women who collect sticks, twigs, leaves and every other biomass material they can find to cook meals - are today at the centre of failing international action. The concern is that women are breathing toxic emissions from the stove and that these same emissions are also adding to the world's climate change burden. The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 established that...