-Down to Earth   Buy an Indian breed from Australia In June last year, we visited Malaysia on the invitation of the country’s oldest and most active consumer action group, The Consumer Association of Penang, to study the livestock production systems and to advise on how these can be transformed into more sustainable and less industrial farming systems. The past 40 years of aggressive industrial growth in Malaysia has seen small-scale peasant agriculture and...

-The Times of India India will fail to achieve some of the most important Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets like reduction in maternal and child deaths, and increase in child immunization rates by 2015. The World Health Organization (WHO) has for the first time aired its views that India will miss its targets, some by a big margin. Dr Nata Menabde, country representative of the WHO, told TOI, "The MDG targets will expire...

-The Telegraph On a full-attendance day at a business process outsourcing centre in a village in Uttar Pradesh, 40 boys and girls work on computers, each of their desktops powered by rooftop solar panels that turn sunlight into electricity. Their workplace, a two-storey building, is the only structure in Sonari, a village of about 1,700 people and located about 50km from Lucknow on the road to Sitapur, where electricity is guaranteed nine...

-Down to Earth As corruption hijacks procurement centres in Bundelkhand, farmers prefer suicide to a debt trap. Richard Mahapatra reports from Uttar Pradesh with photographer Sayantoni Palchoudhuri A fatal paradox strikes Bundelkhand in the face—an overflowing wheat stock yet an overwhelming number of farmer suicides. Farmers here dread the government wheat procurement centre and the post-mortem house. In Orai, a small town in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, the two are...

-PTI The role of the Urban Development Ministry, responsible for creating infrastructure for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, has come under the scanner of the PAC which has flagged some serious issues regarding delay in getting environmental clearance and extending "undue favour" to a private company in awarding contracts. While responding to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) query on the "inordinate delay" in approaching the Environment Ministry for getting clearance, the Urban Development...