-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Right to life outweighed right to do business with the Supreme Court on Monday rejecting State Bank of India's petition challenging an Allahabad high court order directing sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh to sell the sugar stock hypothecated to SBI against loans to pay sugarcane farmers' dues. Sugar mills had taken loans totaling Rs 3,000 crore from SBI by hypothecating their sugar stock. Under law, the...

-IPS News NAPLES, Italy: Small farmers can look to options like agroecological intensification and innovation, without necessarily Turning to climate-smart agriculTure, which is promoted by the United Nations but has awakened doubts among global experts meeting in this Italian city. Alison Power, a professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Cornell University in New York state, said the concept is an umbrella that can encompass too many different...

Documents availed through RTI reveals that the Rural Development minister Shri Nitin Gadkari has ordered to bring drastic changes in the schedule of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which includes changing the labour to material ratio and restricting the implementation of MGNREGA in 1/3rd of backward blocks in India (please click here to access a note on labour-material ratio prepared by People's Action for Employment Guarantee-PAEG). The MoRD has notified the...

-The Hindu The first 1,000 days of life, between a woman's pregnancy and her child's second birthday, are critical for influencing lifelong health and intellectual development of the child The Human Development Report (HDR) released in July 2014 made an important revelation: that India continues to be positioned at 135 in the ranking of 187 countries based on the Human Development Index, and has not moved from where it was positioned the...

-Down to Earth Sivasankaran's land grabbing spree has threatened millions of livelihoods, says report Indian origin businessman Chinnakannan Sivasankaran has engaged in aggressive land grabbing of more than half a million hectares across Africa, Asia and South America, putting millions of livelihoods at risk. This was revealed in a detailed report released by Barcelona-based non-profit GRAIN on Tuesday. The report says Sivasankaran diverted 0.56 million hectares of food-producing land to production of palm...