-The United Nations The United Nations food standards body has agreed on new regulations, including the maximum level of melamine in liquid milk formula for babies, as part of its efforts to help protect the health of consumers, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today. Other measures adopted by the Codex Alimentarius Commission – jointly run by WHO and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – include new food safety standards...

-The Hindu We are grateful to the busy Minister and his associates for taking the trouble of reading our article and responding to it. But we are concerned that in spite of all the wise talk, the bottom line remains an article of faith — “Aadhaar is a must.” The purpose of our article was to point out, first, that ground realities loom large in this matter, and second, that the role...

-Down to Earth   Buy an Indian breed from Australia In June last year, we visited Malaysia on the invitation of the country’s oldest and most active consumer action group, The Consumer Association of Penang, to study the livestock production systems and to advise on how these can be transformed into more sustainable and less industrial farming systems. The past 40 years of aggressive industrial growth in Malaysia has seen small-scale peasant agriculture and...

-The Times of India India will fail to achieve some of the most important Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets like reduction in maternal and child deaths, and increase in child immunization rates by 2015. The World Health Organization (WHO) has for the first time aired its views that India will miss its targets, some by a big margin. Dr Nata Menabde, country representative of the WHO, told TOI, "The MDG targets will expire...

-The Hindu A definite acknowledgement of the potential of Aadhar for public service delivery, and especially for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) by Bharat Bhatti, Jean Drèze, and Reetika Khera in their article “Experiments with Aadhaar” (editorial page, The Hindu, June 27, 2012), is a small step for Aadhaar, but a giant leap for the authors! Process re-engineering in government is never easy, there is enormous resistance both...