-The Indian Express The advertisement industry itself is no stranger to innuendo and double entendre – and it is a blatant hypocrisy to make advertisements for condoms the scapegoat in this issue. India’s reproductive health is the unsuspecting casualty in the recent tussle on the appropriateness of condom advertisements. The advisory issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting on Monday, December 11, directs television channels to restrict the broadcast of condom...

-IndiaSpend.com So far, only a few states such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had made available millets and that too only in certain pockets. The union government proposes to include coarse grains such as jowar (sorghum), bajra (pearl millet) and ragi (finger millet) in the mid-day meal programme in schools and also distribute it through the government subsidised food programme, the public distribution system (PDS), agriculture secretary SK Patnaik said recently. This announcement...

-Down to Earth India needs to find a permanent solution to the problem of public stock holding, as it is a matter of survival for hundreds of millions people During the negotiations for WTO Agreement on Agriculture in 2001, India raised concerns over food security and flexibility that developing nations must have when it comes to providing subsidies to key farm inputs. Seventeen years have passed since then and countries like...

-Livemint.com At a pre-budget consultation, farmers and agriculture economists call for steps to reduce input costs New Delhi: Farmers on Tuesday urged finance minister Arun Jaitley to statutorily ensure income security for them and simultaneously take steps to reduce input costs and thereby make farming profitable. The suggestions from the Consortium of Indian Farmers Associations (CIFA) and agriculture economists was made at the first of the pre-budget consultation. “The median agriculture income is...

-The Times of India If what the central government spends on providing healthcare for its own employees is a measure of what decent healthcare costs, what governments (central and states put together) spend for the ordinary citizen is a paltry sixth of that amount. The recently released National Health Accounts (NHA) 2014-15 shows that the average government spend per citizen per year was just Rs 1,108, against almost Rs 6,300 per...