-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...

-Down to Earth How companies are supplying unsafe and unverified nutrition supplements to children in Karnataka A curious case has emerged in Karnataka. Well-known companies, including Biocon, Jindal Steel and Scania, are supplying spirulina granules to undernourished and malnourished children enrolled in anganwadis (child daycare centres) under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), in direct contravention of a 2004 Supreme Court order which said, “Contractors shall not be used for supply...

-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-Wall Street Journal Blogs Since the program's launch last year, about 9,000 guides have helped reached 1 million women The Alphabet Inc. unit has built an army of thousands of female trainers and sent them to the far corners of the Subcontinent on two-wheelers, hoping to give rural woman their first taste of the web. Each bike has a box full of connected smartphones and tablets for women to try and train...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: A first of its kind study on the state of India’s small towns – those with a population of less than one lakh – has come up with a grim picture of these mushrooming urban settlements. Though the numbers of such towns have grown by 157 % -- from 2223 in 1961 to 5705 in 2011, they have “enormous backlogs” when it comes to basic infrastructure and socio-economic...