An outbreak of papaya mealy bug has affected hundreds of acres of papaya grown in and around Kannivadi and Reddiyarchatram regions in Dindigul district. Since the bug has caused severe damage to the crops, farmers have incurred huge losses. The mealy bug is a polyphagous sucking pest that infests crops such as cotton, papaya, tapioca, mulberry, jatropha and other cultivable crops. The pest sucks the sap of the plant and weakens...

Ergonomics is no longer the privilege of those working in plush offices. If things fall in place, Rajasthan may be the first state to take it to the absolute grassroots -- at the NREGA worksite. In a pathbreaking move, the MIT Institute of Design in Pune, under the National Knowledge Commission, has taken the plunge for fine-tuning traditional tools used for digging and moving earth specially in NREGA so as...

Janhit Abhiyan, an umbrella group of Professors, writers, filmmakers, journalists and social justice proponents, has, in a statement, denounced the campaign against caste-based census by “a section of intellectuals and media,” and said this amounted to undermining the consensus arrived at in Parliament. The statement was signed among others by Prof. Tulsiram and Prof. Chamanlal of the Jawaharlal Nehru University; writers Surendra Mohan, Sheeba Aslam Fahmi , Umrao Singh Jatav and...

More thought needs to be given to the kind of data generated and its practical implications.  Yesterday when the census enumerator visited, I asked him how he felt about the current debate on counting caste in the census: “Not comfortable at all”, he said, “I don't even like asking whether someone is SC/ST or Other, leave alone what their caste is.” But, he added, “caste is an inescapable reality of...

Poverty attracts two kinds of policy interventions. The first hopes to eradicate it and the second wants to keep the poor alive. In India, our prime effort has always been, right from the days of antodaya, to somehow keep the poor ticking, even at the lowest levels of subsistence. The NREGA scheme saves the impoverished from starvation on a six-monthly basis. We see the same mindset at work in the...