-TheWire.in In India, caste and practices related to caste are inescapable in the waste-management conundrum. There’s a wonderful book called Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay about England in bygone days when it was still heavily rural and agricultural labour was the life of thousands of people. The recent release of the Swachh Survekshan rankings of India’s cleanest cities suggests someone should write a book called Ask the People Who Pick Up...

-The Indian Express A single national agriculture market, promised by the BJP in its 2014 manifesto, remains a pipe dream. Can the government reform the broken APMC structure in the last year of its term? In its 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the BJP promised to evolve a single national agriculture market (NAM) in the country with a view to enable farmers to get a better price and consumers to pay a...

-The Telegraph Results BRIng under stress perception of pre-eminence New Delhi: Students from private schools have continued to fare worse than their peers from government and government-aided schools in the Central Board of Secondary Education's Class XII exams, whose results were announced on Saturday. The results appear to belie the popular perception that private schools impart a higher quality of education than government and aided schools. Some 83.01 per cent of the students passed,...

-BangaloreMirror.com Sterlite protests have raised some troubling questions: why was ‘illegal’ foreign funding legalised and why was Vedanta given an extension? In 2013, India witnessed what many believe was an organic, mass movement against corruption in politics. Many people viewed one party as thoroughly corrupt and started looking at its main rival with some hope. They thought this second party deserved be voted to power. In March 2014, the Delhi High Court...

-Frontline.in The women-led climate-resilient farming model created by Swayam Shikshan Prayog in drought-hit Marathwada has yielded encouraging results and is worthy of emulation across the country. “LOOK at our quinoa. It has grown so well,” says a beaming Shailaja Narwade from Masia village near Solapur in interior Maharashtra. Shailaja has planted the traditional South American plant not for consumption but in order to harvest its seeds. “Quinoa seeds are very valuable...