-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's Budget speech has promised a hundred smart cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...

-The Financial Express The government has identified 46 million hectare of agricultural land spread across 122 districts that is likely to be adversely impacted by extreme weather events and cause decline in farm output, agriculture minster Radha Mohan Singh on Tuesday said. "Uncertain and erratic rainfall, delay in onset of monsoon, agricultural droughts, excess rainfall events and other extreme weather events during crop growing seasons may affect agricultural productivity and profitability of...

-Down to Earth Health experts blame Centre's over-emphasis on women's sterilisation for the Chhattisgarh tragedy THERE WAS nothing right about the sterilisation camp held on November 8 in Chhattisgarh's Takhatpur block of Bilaspur district. An overambitious government doctor-with unsterilised equipment and virtually no manpower-set out to conduct laparoscopic tubectomy on 83 women in an abandoned private hospital. The mass sterilisation led to the death of 13 women and left others critically ill. They were...

-FirstPost.com The MGNREGA rural job programme and other social welfare schemess will take a significant hit due to the 15 percent Budget cut that the ministry of finance is believed to have proposed recently, social activists said Saturday. "You (the government) cut fund allocations from social and development programmes and then talk of development. That is so wrong. Such notion is misplaced and insulting," said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at...

-The Telegraph Differences with the Prime Minister's Office appear to have held up key schemes of the women and child development (WCD) ministry announced in the Budget five months ago. Among the measures stalled is the "one-stop rape crisis centres", christened Nirbhaya centres after the 2012 Delhi bus rape victim and seen as a pet project of Maneka Gandhi. The finance ministry had approved Rs 500 crore for the plan but, with the...