-The Hindu None of our Teacher Education programmes has ever seriously tried to achieve a clear and convincing enough understanding of what one tries to achieve through education. It always has been a rhetoric of larger aims and working for myopically understood parental and market aspirations All curricula are situated in contexts and are simultaneously guided by ideals. Therefore, an understanding of and a balance between the two is essential. We have succeeded...

-The Hindu The trajectory of the Narendra Modi government's education policy has been "disappointing and makes one apprehensive," said Dr. Devesh Kapur, Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on human capital, diaspora and political and economic change in developing countries. "It makes me apprehensive. I don't see any fundamental change in a view - common to our Left and...

-The Hindu Business Line   Cocoa has enriched the lifestyle of one lakh farmers in the four southern States When Cadbury India (now Mondelez India Foods Ltd) representatives approached Sabapathy, a coconut farmer at Sethumadai village, 16 km from Pollachi in Tamil Nadu, with some cocoa seedling to be raised as an intercrop in his coconut grove, Sabapathy says he was not interested at all. "They did not give up and I ultimately gave...

-The Hindu Business Line   BARC finds 91.77 ppm of the material in DAP; fertiliser industry says it can't be blamed When the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) found high levels of uranium in fertiliser and soil samples from the Malwa region of Punjab last week, activists in the area were not surprised. They have long been warning about environmental contamination due to excessive phosphate fertiliser use. Local reports indicated that BARC found uranium...

-The Financial Express The government has identified 46 million hectare of agricultural land spread across 122 districts that is likely to be adversely impacted by extreme weather events and cause decline in farm output, agriculture minster Radha Mohan Singh on Tuesday said. "Uncertain and erratic rainfall, delay in onset of monsoon, agricultural droughts, excess rainfall events and other extreme weather events during crop growing seasons may affect agricultural productivity and profitability of...