-Down to Earth Death of cotton farmers due to pesticide poisoning in the Vidarbha region raises vital questions about the government's attitude towards regulation of toxic pesticides One more evil has reared its ugly head in Maharashtra’s arid Vidarbha region, which has so far been infamous for farmer suicides. Some 35 farmers in the region have died of pesticide poisoning in last four months. Most of them were working in cotton and...

-Frontline.in The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people. THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in...

-The Times of India RAIPUR: Witnessing tremendous drop in child malnourishment in last five years through various beneficial schemes, Chhattisgarh's Balrampur district hopes for better results than before as administration has made it mandatory to provide eggs to 44,000 Aanganwadi children as its pilot project. Children who don't prefer to eat eggs are provided milk and banana once a week. It's apparently the first time that Aaganwadi children are bring served with...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Most households covered by government-funded health insurance have to use personal funds to pay for hospitalisation, a study has suggested, iterating concerns about the wisdom of deploying public-funded insurance schemes to seek universal health coverage in India. The study, designed to determine how well government-funded health insurance protects households from health expenditure, has found that 66 per cent of such households who sought healthcare in public hospitals and...

-The Nature Conservancy India Program, Institute on the Environment (University of Minnesota), Borlaug Institute for South Asia & International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center   Air pollution is a major cause of premature mortality globally and the problem is particularly acute in rapidly developing countries like India. Crop residue burning contributes substantially to this problem. Currently, 80 percent of agriculture in Northwest India uses a rice-wheat production system dependent on burning...