-The Telegraph   Thiruvananthapuram: A central directorate has said government advertisements are "approved" by the UPA chairperson's office besides that of the Prime Minister, prompting the Opposition to cite this as evidence of its claim that Sonia Gandhi was involved in the government's day-to-day running. In reply to an RTI question, the Directorate of Audio Visual Publicity, which functions under the Union information and broadcasting ministry, said: "DAVP is the nodal agency of...

-The Hindu Business Line   Technology is transforming Indian agriculture and increasing output. This is good news, given that India may need to produce 90 million tonnes of foodgrain annually by 2030 to feed its growing population, says Vishwanath Kulkarni Jitendra, a prosperous farmer from Machrauli in Haryana, had barely hired a combine to harvest wheat on his 10-acre plot when clouds started building up. The weather office had predicted rains over the...

-Economic and Political Weekly     This paper presents results from a larger household-, school-, and institutional-level study on the role of the private sector and the early phase of implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. While some of the controversies about the RTE Act were reported in the media and publicly discussed, this paper reports data from semi-structured interviews with key education officials and implementers,...

-The Hindustan Times   Kokrajhar (Assam): Nearly two years after deadly ethnic riots led to more than 100 deaths and displaced over 4.5 lakh people in Kokrajhar region of Assam, fear and tension prevails. Communities - especially, the Bodos and Bengali-speaking immigrant Muslims - living in close proximity across the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District appear to be completely polarised. In the small village of Joyma a few kilometres from Gosaigaon, around 150 Bengali-speaking...

-The Business Standard   However, PDS won't be hampered as govt hold 48 mn tonnes in its warehouses The government on Tuesday said its wheat procurement for the 2014-15 marketing year (ending March 2015) is likely to be below the last year's level of 25 million tonnes (mt) due to poor quality of the crop. However, for a government which has been battling lack of storage space during the ongoing wheat procurement season,...