Sivadasan's five-acre farm used to be a solitary patch in Kerala's Palakkad district, with bitter gourd, cucumber, cow peas and lady's finger growing amid a landscape dotted with paddy fields and plantations of rubber and spices.  Just five years later, more than 1.45 lakh farmers in the southern state have joined Sivadasan and started growing vegetables, reflecting a palpable shift sweeping across the Indian countryside.  "Vegetables are always more profitable than paddy,"...

Jawaharlal Nehru did a huge amount for education in India. He gave us the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and much else. Yet, for a man whose birthday is celebrated as Children's Day, he had relatively little to do with primary schooling. The first Five Year Plan allocated just about Rs 12 crore for investment in primary education, out...

Global climate strategy needs a new storyline. The original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (“Plan A”) was signed almost 20 years ago, but lacked the specifics to drive real action. The Kyoto Protocol aimed to resolve this by curbing emissions from the industrialised world, but the US refused to play its part (Plan B). Just as Kyoto came into effect in 2005, the world was changing, with...

-The Times of India   Born in Parliament, the right to education (RTE) is now being nurtured by children who want to make it a reality in every part of the country. On Children's Day, students from different states related their struggles and successes in bringing their friends to school and teachers to the classroom. They demanded hygienic mid-day meals for students and also raised their voice against gender discrimination. These little...

-PTI   Admitting that the government is neglecting research in the farm sector, the agriculture ministry has sought more funds in the next Five Year Plan (2012-2017) for significant jump in foodgrain production. "I think, we are neglecting agricultural Science. The amount of importance that we should be giving, we are not giving, though we have very good scientists," Basu said at an international agri-conference here. "We are decades behind in agriculture Science as...