-TheWire.in Swayam Shikshan Prayog, a Maharashtra-based non-profit, is helping women become clean energy pioneers, in an initiative that has earned them a UN climate award. Varsha Pawar of Osmanabad district in Maharashtra was like any other housewife till she started selling solar cook stoves and lamps in her neighbourhood a little over a year ago. Life was never the same again. Today, she is the sarpanch (village council chief) of Tirth Khurd,...

-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...

-Outlook Deputy director, ILO Decent Work Team for South Asia and Country Office for India, Sher Singh Verick on India’s high but “jobless” growth mystery Sher Singh Verick, deputy director, ILO Decent Work Team for South Asia and Country Office for India, strives to unr­avel India’s high but “jobless” growth mystery. Excerpts from an e-mail interview: * On high growth, low jobs Economic growth through investment, consumption and exports generally res­ults in more jobs,...

-The Indian Express The incidence of farmers taking their own lives is higher in regions where cooperative banks are the weakest. Nanded (Maharashtra): The verdant soyabean fields at Digras today are a far cry from the barren landscape they presented only a few months ago. But for residents of this village in Ardhapur taluka of Nanded district, the memories of drought in three out of the last four years will not fade...

-The Hindu Business Line Even though technological changes imperil many jobs, care services are unlikely to be affected thanks to the significance of face-to-face human interaction involved in them Across the world there is much gloom and doom about the impact of technological changes on jobs, as automation and other innovations are seen to threaten not just blue-collar jobs but also many forms of office work. It is true that the way...