-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's budget speech has promised a hundred smart Cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...

-PTI New Delhi: Three out of five people feel unsafe on Indian roads, says a survey conducted in 12 Cities of the country including the four metros. During the survey, the general public expressed strong support for the Road Transport and Safety Bill, 2014 and expressed hope that roads will become safer. "81 per cent of all respondents "strongly favor" passing of the proposed road safety Bill and 90 per cent believe that...

-FirstPost.com The MGNREGA rural job programme and other social welfare schemess will take a significant hit due to the 15 percent budget cut that the ministry of finance is believed to have proposed recently, social activists said Saturday. "You (the government) cut fund allocations from social and development programmes and then talk of development. That is so wrong. Such notion is misplaced and insulting," said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at...

-The Hindu Business Line Questioning the kind of growth model pursued by the Government, civil society activists on Saturday called for a wider public debate on the reported move to curtail social sector spending on schemes such as the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGA, and for the HIV affected. "Considering the fact that the Government is forecasting a 5.3 per cent growth rate for this year, the social sector cuts in Budget...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The runaway growth in states of subsidised solar pumps, which provide quality energy at near-zero marginal cost, can pose a bigger threat of groundwater over-exploitation than free power has done so far. The best way to meet this threat is by paying farmers to "grow" solar power as a remunerative cash crop. Doing so can reduce pressure on aquifers, cut the subsidy burden on electricity companies, reduce...