-The Business Standard UN report shows holes in govt's food security proposal The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has worked out the cost of malnutrition to the world economy: about five per cent of its annual gross domestic product, or $3.5 trillion, in terms of foregone production and health expenditure. Even more important is the FAO's assessment of potential gains from investment in enhancing the nutritional standards of the population....

-The Hindu Indentured labour may be a forgotten part of our colonial economic history but Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still sending ‘Girmitya' to toil in distant lands The descendants of indentured labourers, who migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to erstwhile colonies, recently met at The Hague in the Netherlands to commemorate 140 years of migration - perpetuated through a system popularly known as ‘Girmit.' They gathered from all...

-PTI GUWAHATI: Flood situation in Assam worsened on Sunday with 43 more villages in three districts getting submerged, while water entered the Kaziranga National Park where an antelope was killed, officials said. About 65,000 people of 170 villages in seven districts - Dhemaji, Tinsukia, Golaghat, Jorhat, Kamrup, Karimganj and Lakhimpur - were affected. However, there was no report of any casualty. According to Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA), Brahmaputra and its...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

Groundwater, which irrigates half of Indian agriculture and provides 85% of rural drinking consumption, is an increasingly scarce resource. There is a growing understanding that it must be approached as a common property resource for collective benefit. It is best understood and managed by those who live near them and use them rather than agencies who visit sporadically - that is the central premise of efforts around participatory groundwater management....