Over seven lakh calls to a phone number set up to register the number of supporters for an anti-corruption movement. Schoolchildren who have swapped their cricketing heroes for a 78-year-old Gandhian who is fasting unto death. Cries castigating Manmohan Singh's effeteness being greeted by a roar in the swelling crowds. And a mostly-out-of work Uma Bharti scouting for a photo-op but barely managing one. At Jantar Mantar, the site of Anna...

The Centre will come up with a ‘Look East’ policy to boost kharif staple rice production in eastern states. A national-level conference scheduled to be held in New Delhi on April 6-7 will formulate strategies to maximise summer-sown crop output by hiking area and production in eastern states, which have more irrigated, alluvial soil and higher water table than those in the northwest.   “The focus will be on rice and introduction...

In Kerala, where paddy cultivation is going out of favour because of labour problems and high costs, the novel System of Rice Intensification’ (SRI) has shown the potential to rehabilitate this crop. This innovative technique ensures substantially higher productivity and lower input use. The SRI system has, in fact, proved its utility in many other regions as well, spanning Sikkim in the north-east to Tamil Nadu in the south. The environment-friendly SRI...

National Advisory Council starts discussions on Lokpal Bill The Prime Minister's Office (PMO), late on Monday evening, issued an appeal to noted social worker Anna Hazare to abandon the hunger strike he had announced he would resort to, starting Tuesday, to force the government to accept his version of the Lokpal Bill. The appeal came a few hours after the National Advisory Council (NAC)'s Working Group on Transparency and Accountability met civil...

Armed with a clutch of numbers, drawing on raw data as well as intelligent guesswork, Leela Visaria had six years ago generated a figure for India’s population in 2011 that is closest to what the 2011 census has actually thrown up. Visaria, a demographer at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), an academic institution in Ahmedabad, had predicted that India’s population would grow to 1,204 million, just six million away...