Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...
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India Holds Government Accountable For Millennium Development Goals by Pamela Philipose
Among the various definitions of "noise" is this one: "Something that draws public notice". And "Making Noise" is precisely what groups all over India are doing, or planning to do, in the days ahead in order to wake up the government to its promises. In the year 2000, India was among the countries that had signed on to achieve, by 2015, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals...
More »Banks may find it tough to ensure microfinance companies don’t charge high rates
Banks will have to put in place a mechanism to verify that microfinance institutes (MFI) they finance do not charge exorbitant rates to the final borrowers. The finance ministry has asked banks to ensure that MFIs, whom banks are financing, do not lend at rates more than 24% — all inclusive rates — to the ultimate borrowers. Some banks have recently inserted a clause while lending to MFIs that they...
More »Jatropha Boom Yields Tough Lessons by Manipadma Jena
With a gas-guzzler of an economy, India had been spending tens of billions of dollars annually to import petroleum. And so its 2009 policy on biofuels mandated that by 2017, India would have enough biofuel production to cover at least 20 percent of the country’s oil consumption. The government has in fact been encouraging the cultivation of jatropha curcas for the past seven years, believing that would be the fastest way...
More »Farmers demand single national policy for land acquisition
Demanding a uniform guideline for acquisition of their land, a farmers' convention on Sunday accused the government of failing in providing an appropriate policy to get peasants out of debt-trap. "It is the government which is responsible for suicides by farmers due to debt... successive governments have miserably failed in framing a proper policy to favour peasants," All India Kisan Coordination Committee chief and former MP Bhupinder Singh Mann said...
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