-The Indian Express Does away with need for village revenue officer’s signature; guards against crop insurance fraud. Pune: Early in December, when Bhagwan Ingole, a farmer from Malegaon in Ardhrapur taluka of Nanded went to the Citizen Facilitation Centre in his village to insure his one acre of rabi chana (bengal gram) crop, he was in for a surprise. During the previous seasons, the operator of this one-stop shop catering to most...

-The Hindu Women consume more sugar than men, says FIRst such survey of seven Indian metros The mean intake of added sugar among metro cities of India, measured in grams per day, is the highest in Mumbai and the least in Hyderabad, according to a survey undertaken by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), Hyderabad, and sponsored by the International Life Sciences Institute-India (ILSI-India). The joint initiative by...

-Livemint.com News of India recording the world’s most New Year’s Day births seems to have revived talk of a strict population control policy. But there is no need for panic. Nor state intervention. For decades, doomsday theories of our population boom have been used to explainrising poverty and unemployment, food shortages and health crises, environmental degradation and climate change. This New Year’s Day, Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s agency, estimated that nearly...

-The New Indian Express The Survey of India plans to use drones to create a high-resolution map of every inch of India. It comes with unprecedented privacy and security challenges The Survey of India (SoI) has embarked upon an ambitious project of using drone imaging to create an ultra-high resolution spatial and topographic map of India. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, calls it the biggest endeavour in Indian...

-TheWire.in The Narendra Modi government's push to have research institutions depend less on public funds has been turned into a bad idea by the government's own priorities. “Innovate, patent, produce, prosper.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered these words in his inaugural address at the 107th Indian Science Congress, now underway in Bengaluru. Modi’s prescription (FIRst advanced in early 2018) describes a straightforward path to success but it also quietly assumes an environment and...