-International Business Times   Consider this: There are 400 million Indians with no access to workplace benefits, such as social security, health insurance or unemployment insurance, a number higher than the population of the United States and Canada combined, according to a Delhi-based group of economic researchers. So, as the United States grapples with growing income inequality, it takes a country like India to put some of those economic and working realities into...

-IANS   NEW DELHI: Rapid economic growth has engineered employment in India but also led to deteriorated working conditions in many sectors, especially manufacturing, an expert said at a conference here Wednesday. Speaking at "Dialogues on the India Exclusion Report-2014", Ravi Srivastava, a professor in the Centre for the Study of Regional Development in Jawaharlal Nehru University, elaborated how the rapid economic boom (2003-2014) generated employment in the country, but necessarily didn't offer...

- Guardian News & Media 2014   The world's most widely used insecticides have contaminated the environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment of the chemicals' impacts. The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Silent Spring, the landmark 1956 book by Rachel Carson that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the blanket use of DDT and other...

-Down to Earth   UN agency's latest state of the forests report says poverty alleviation and rural employment should be the ulterior driving force in amending old forest policies Recognising the role of forests in providing livelihood to people, UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has asked nations to formulate people-centric forest policies. "It is time for forestry to shift perspective from trees to people," says FAO's annual "The State of the World's...

Punjab, which was known to be the land of agricultural prosperity during the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the Green Revolution, has increasingly witnessed its small and marginal farmers being pushed out of the agricultural sector. Based on a survey (conducted in 2012-13) of 288 farmers from 12 villages—2 villages from each of the 6 districts that represent various agro-climatic zones—the study by Sukhpal Singh and Shruti Bhogal reveals that...