-Down to Earth Faced with crop losses because of erratic rainfall and extreme weather, tribal farmers of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh turn to bewar and penda forms of cultivation that keeps them nourished all times of the year, but government agencies are bent on rooting out these farm practices Hariaro Bai Deoria should have been a worried person this year-an untimely spell of rain late last October flattened her paddy crop, and...

-The Hindu Experts say people can keep diseases away if they consume millets Guntur (Andhra Pradesh): The two-day Millet Festival - 2014, aimed at popularising consuming low fat and high fibre millet began at Gunta Grounds here on Saturday. The festival is being held for the first time in districts outside Hyderabad in a bid to promote consumption of millet. Minister for Agriculture Kanna Lakshminarayana, Commissioner of Agriculture K. Madhusudhan Rao and College...

-Down to Earth 'CPCB underestimating pollution from coal-fired thermal power plants' Data released by NASA's Aura satellite calls into question the veracity of Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) claim made in 2012 that the mean sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions in India decreased in 2010 as compared to 2001 level. A new study led by Zifeng Lu of Decision and Information Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, USA, based on images...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The World Health Organisation's official relations with various non-State actors are under the scanner as the next WHO executive board meeting took off in Geneva on Monday. The non-State actors are being accused of representing the private commercial sector and of being guided by the market profit-making logic and not by public interest. The NGO Policy of the WHO defines NGOs as those groups whose main...

-National Academy of Agricultural Sciences After almost 67 years of Independence, malnutrition continues to plague India. Even while vast segments of resource-poor people suffer from undernutrition, particularly micronutrient deficiencies (hidden hunger), there is a growing incidence of obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer etc. Both the ends of this grim spectrum are at least partly due to changing food habits, loss of millets from the diet being one...