Father Cedric Prakash is a human rights and peace activist based in Ahmedabad. He has campaigned for the justice of the victims of the 2002 communal violence on peril of being publicly branded as “non-Gujarati and non-Hindu” by chief minister Narendra Modi. A resident of Gujarat for nearly 40 years, Prakash is the founding director of Prashant, a centre for human rights, peace and justice. He was named Chevalier of the...

Sivadasan's five-acre farm used to be a solitary patch in Kerala's Palakkad district, with bitter gourd, cucumber, cow peas and lady's finger growing amid a landscape dotted with paddy fields and plantations of rubber and spices.  Just five years later, more than 1.45 lakh farmers in the southern state have joined Sivadasan and started growing vegetables, reflecting a palpable shift sweeping across the Indian countryside.  "Vegetables are always more profitable than paddy,"...

'Food subsidy is a massive burden…if so much is spent on subsidies, what is left for development?' agriculture minister Sharad Pawar recently asked. It is a legitimate question that is on the minds of many but seldom gets asked for fear of appearing callous. Are we prematurely trying to be a welfare State? In the developed world, safety nets like food stamps are regarded as humanitarian obligations toward the poor....

-FAO   Aquaculture is the world's fastest-growing source of animal protein and currently provides nearly half of all fish consumed globally, according to a report published here by FAO.   The report World Aquaculture 2010 found that global production of fish from aquaculture grew more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2008, from 32.4 million tonnes to 52.5 million tonnes. It also forecasts that by 2012 more than 50 percent of the world's food...

As in most social sector indicators, Kerala tops the national child rights index, followed by Karnataka. Arunachal Pradesh is the worst performer in protecting the rights of children. Strangely, Kerala's child marriage indicator is the lowest, and the State's performance is far from satisfactory in early childhood care and crimes against children. One point that stands out in the indexing — the first of its kind in the country — is that...