-FirstPost.com Even as the Narendra Modi government has been making claims that India’s rural economy has gained pace under his rule, empirical evidence suggests that the health of country’s rural economy may not have improved much on account of declining or stagnant income levels. The situation, experts say, is unlikely to change in the near future as there are low chances of a revival in rural income generation. A survey by brokerage...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Tehelka The decision was taken four days after the music video ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’ went viral transcending all boundaries and created huge outrage against company’s disregard for the lives of it’s former employees and environment. Finally, the corporate giant Hindustan Uniliver yielded before the power of the common man and decided to clean up mercury contaminated soil in the premises of its closed thermometer factory in Kodaikanal. The decision was taken four days...

-The Hindu Business Line Ahmedabad: As nearly 40,000 citizens signed a petition asking tea companies to clean up chai, The Wagh Bakri Group, India's third largest tea packager, on Thursday said it would support Greenpeace's attempts to eliminate pesticides from tea cultivation in the country. Wagh Bakri has engaged with Greenpeace India whose report "Trouble Brewing" and highlighted pesticide residue in tea samples recently. Hindustan Unilever Ltd and Girnar Tea have already announced...

-The Hindustan Times   Like all other children, 11-year-old Gayatri Kachari loves playing. And if play involves water, she loves it even more. For many children at Sajjanpara Lower Primary School in Assam's Kamrup district, the three minutes spent washing their hands as a group before their mid-day meal is the highlight of the day. The children cheerfully sing the "Hand Washing song" as they scrub their hands under running water...