-The Indian Express   Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan on Friday came out in support of NCP leader and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s suggestion to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the UPA’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme (NREGS) should be suspended for “at least three months in a year” so that agricultural labourers are available during the peak season of agricultural operations in various parts of the country. “He (Sharad Pawar) is a...

U.P.'s GDP grew at 7.28 per cent in the past five years, but the State ranks low in virtually every area of socio-economic development. IF statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) are the only criteria to evaluate the performance of a government, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh will have to be rated as one with highly impressive credentials. For, India's most populous State has recorded a...

-The United Nations    Ensuring global food security while striving to save the Planet from damage are the greatest challenges of this century, a senior United Nations official said today, stressing the need to enable smallholder farmers to become more resilient to climate change and to produce more food in ways that are environmentally sustainable. “There is no trade-off between feeding people and saving our Planet,” said Kanayo F. Nwanze, the President of...

The 11th five-year plan promised the nation “inclusive growth”. It marked a departure from the earlier official position that the “benefits of growth” would automatically “trickle down” to the poor, and that if growth was not actually benefiting the poor, then the reason lay in its not being high enough. The 11th plan, by contrast, conceded that the “benefits of growth” did not automatically “trickle down”, but argued that growth...

The current impasse in Parliament has created a logjam that threatens to disrupt the proceedings of the winter session. The latest reason that has brought the situation to such a pass is the decision of the Union cabinet to permit foreign direct investment (FDI) in the multi-brand retail sector, opening the way for international supermarket giants like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco to open their shops in India. While the Cabinet does...