-The Guardian In a village in India's poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages? Sumant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-east India and he knew he could improve on the four or five tonnes per hectare that he usually...

-The Guardian Communities have more hope than ever of seeing off companies trying to acquire their land, with support from media and NGOs A new report on land acquisition by the Munden Project/Rights and Resources Initiative brings an important angle to the land "grab" debate. Rather than focusing on the ethics of land grabbing, the report makes the business case for working with local communities, arguing that failure to inform or fairly...

-The Hindu Panel made details of incident, witnessed by street-children, part of its report It is almost a month since the Justice Verma Committee came out with its recommendations to make laws more stringent to deal with crimes against women, particularly sexual assault cases. Though the government acted swiftly by bringing out an ordinance to make amendments in criminal laws, it seems to have overlooked some crucial portions of the report which...

-The World Bank Blog Infecting more than 1 billion people globally, the 7 major Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) cause blindness, disfigurement, anemia and cognitive impairment, and yet can be controlled or even eliminated by taking pills once or twice a year. NTDs are not simply neglected in terms of awareness and resource allocation but also in the sense that they affect some of the most neglected communities on the planet –...

-The Business Standard Implement it with watershed development schemes to alleviate poverty The United Progressive Alliance government appears to be upbeat regarding the prospects of its flagship scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which provides a universal, self-targeting guarantee of 100 days of employment to every household in all rural districts of India. “MGNREGA has tremendous potential to increase agricultural production, which we have not been able to...