-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: A working group of the Sonia-Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has called for the creation of dedicated human resource departments at central ministries dealing with social programmes to ensure better delivery of the government's flagship schemes. The working group has suggested that the proposed HR wings should be entrusted with the responsibility of framing guidelines for recruitment and training of frontline workers, besides laying down key performance indicators...

-PTI KOLKATA: A lamp which produces high Quality light and doubles up as a device to cook food without causing pollution has been invented by a team of engineers in Maharashtra. Suitable particularly for rural households which lack clean cooking fuel and electricity, the device, aptly named Lanstove (lantern combined with cook stove), has been developed by researchers from Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) in Maharashtra's Phaltan. IIT graduate Anil Rajvanshi, who led...

-The Hindu Biomass cookstoves and solar lighting improve the health of women and are creating business models that empower them Around the world three billion people have no access to modern cooking fuels. They depend mostly on direct burning of solid biomass for cooking and heating. The smoke from these rudimentary stoves causes some four million deaths annually, destroys millions of tonnes of crops and leads to global warming and large-scale regional...

-The Hindu Those opposing GM crops ignore scientific evidence of their harmlessness and are depriving the nation of the wider benefits of agri-biotechnology It is unfortunate that the technical group appointed by the Supreme Court has chosen to stick with its recommendation for an indefinite moratorium on GM crop trials. There is fierce opposition from activists even to the introduction of the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority Bill (BRAI) in Parliament, meant to evolve...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In another proof that worsening air Quality in Indian cities is affecting people's health, a study has found that Indians have 30% lower lung function as compared to Europeans. Things could get worse if immediate steps are not taken to curb vehicular emission, doctors warned. The study was conducted on 10,000 healthy, non-smoking individuals in Jaipur, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Kashmir. "We measured the Peak Expiratory...