-The Hindu   Agriculture Department reports drop in use of fertilizer in the past two years Mysore: Ahead of a new cropping season in the district, data furnished by the Department of Agriculture here shows decline in the use of fertilizers in the last two years. According to the department, farmers were expected to use 1.65 lakh tonnes of fertilizers, including non-urea fertilizers and urea, based on the area of cultivation in the previous...

-Brookings India Working Paper   The Women's Reservation Bill, which proposes to reserves 33 per cent of seats in Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies for women, has been doing the rounds of Indian Parliament in various forms since it was first introduced by the Deve Gowda government in 1996, failing each time, to pass. But during all these years that political parties have been passing the buck for their comprehensive failure...

-Frontline   A study on untouchability practices in 1,589 villages in Gujarat provides critical data for the Dalit movement to shape its interventions at the national and international levels. DESPITE laws making it punishable, untouchability continues to exist in the country in a vicious manner. A study titled "Understanding Untouchability: A Comprehensive Study of Practices and Conditions in 1,589 villages", conducted in Gujarat by the Navsarjan Trust, an organisation that promotes the...

-The Indian Express How Punjab is making the best use of the flawed public distribution system. Inclusive economic growth is a political, economic and social necessity. The question is: what is the right strategy to ensure this? Most of our programmes to help the underprivileged have suffered from leakages and inefficiencies, so that the benefits have not accrued to the targeted groups but the strain on our fiscal deficit remains. Subsidies are...

-The Hindu Amidst worrisome indications that human-induced climate change is affecting the monsoon over India, research just published adds to a body of evidence showing that extremes in rainfall are increasing. "Our analyses indicate a shift in the recent period towards more intense wet spells and more frequent but less intense dry spells," say a team of researchers from Stanford University in the U.S. in a Nature Climate Change paper. The scientists examined...