-AFP Paris: Surging populations and economies in the developing world will cause a double crunch in demand for water and energy in the coming decades, the UN said Friday. In a report published on the eve of World Water Day, it said the cravings for clean water and electricity were intertwined and could badly strain Earth's limited resources. "Demand for freshwater and energy will continue to increase over the coming decades to meet...

-Financial Chronicle India's independence in 1947 had the great Bengal famine as its backdrop. During the Bengal famine of 1942-43, over three million children, women and men died of starvation. India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, therefore, said in 1947, "Everything else can wait; but not agriculture". This commitment led to the initiation of several programmes in the field of agriculture, such as extension of irrigation facilities, establishment of seed corporations,...

-The Hindu With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply-and-quality constraints, many international investors are beginning to view water as the new oil There is a popular, tongue-in-cheek saying in America - attributed to the writer Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California Water Wars - that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." It highlights the consequences, even if...

-The Hindu Abitha, a Ph.D student at the IISc, has come up with Algiculture, a technique to grow paddy along with an oil-producing algae, helping farmers earn additional income Hyderabad: Good news for paddy farmers! They can now doubly benefit by growing an additional crop without incurring additional cost, apart from contributing to the nation's fuel needs. A student of Ph.D at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bangalore, has devised a technique...

-PTI Under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, the government aims to connect 20,000 MW of solar power to the National Grid by 2022. India will add nearly 30,000 MW of power generation capacity from renewable energy sources - doubling it from the current size - in the next four years, a senior official said on Wednesday. "We plan to add around 20,000 MW of wind and around 10,000 MW of solar capacity...