-Down to Earth Japan's Sapporo brewery patents Indian barley gene without giving benefit to farmers Ballia district, the easternmost part of Uttar Pradesh, is a flood-prone area that extends towards Bihar from the confluence of the Ganga and the Ghaghra. Over decades, its farmers, mostly marginal and small, have been cultivating barley, exchanging its seeds, improving the varieties and giving these to a government project to cull the best of the lot....

-The Hindu With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply-and-quality constraints, many international investors are beginning to view water as the new oil There is a popular, tongue-in-cheek saying in America - attributed to the writer Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California Water Wars - that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." It highlights the consequences, even if...

-The Hindu The Provisions of the Bill are aimed at creating "conducive" atmosphere for street vendors, and designated spaces for them to carry out their business. A Bill that provides for protection of livelihoods rights, social security of street vendors and for regulation of urban street vending in the country--the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill, 2014--was passed in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. Moving the Bill for...

-The Indian Express Pre-legislative scrutiny is a first step towards greater transparency in law-making. The committee of secretaries chaired by the cabinet secretary has decided that all bills proposed by the government should go through a process of pre-legislative scrutiny. This follows the recommendation of the National Advisory Council, which had suggested that all bills be taken through this process in order to garner public feedback at an early stage. Let us quickly...

-The Business Standard The economic logic - and political reasons - behind the giant shift of spending power to the states Interim Budgets are not supposed to do this. This is precisely what they are not supposed to do. They are not supposed to lay out a policy change so vast it disempowers the next central government. But that's what P Chidambaram has done - and it appears to have been...