-Deccan Herald In accordance with a new agroecology initiative within the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, by using the agroecological methods, small farmers are key to feeding the world, Nafeez Ahmed notes. Modern industrial agricultural methods can no longer feed the world, due to the impacts of overlapping environmental and ecological crises linked to land, water and resource availability. The stark warning comes from the new United Nations Special Rapporteur on the...

-The Indian Express The central empowered committee of the Supreme Court has asked the Rajasthan government to immediately stop mining activities allowed around Sariska in "blatant violation" of the court's orders and name the officers responsible so that "appropriate action" can be taken against them. The decision to allow mining activities within one kilometre of the Sariska tiger reserve and Jamua Ramgarh sanctuary was taken at a meeting chaired by then acting...

-The Business Standard Scheme faces pincer attack with a proposed higher proportion of expenditure on material, reducing the budget available to pay wages The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) faces a pincer attack under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, with parallel moves promising to shrink and mutate the nature of the scheme. Two of the moves have been revealed - a proposed higher proportion of expenditure on material,...

-Hard News Floods in Kashmir could have been managed better if there was a reliable early warning system The first fortnight of September saw Jammu and Kashmir being ravaged by severe flash floods. But, according to the snatches of news we got, the monsoon was below average in the state until the last week of August. Thereafter, four days of incessant rain in the Valley and in Jammu made almost all the...

-TheGoan.net As had been anticipated, on October 18, the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to decontrol the prices of diesel, the most widely-used petroleum product in the country. Riding on an unexpected fall in world prices of crude oil, the government was able to simultaneously announce a sharp fall in consumer prices of diesel by Rs 3.37 per litre (in Delhi). But the decision...