-PTI The country’s largest prison Tihar has been asked by the Central Information Commission to develop a system of giving compensation to inmates who have been incarcerated for a duration more than their sentence period. The Commission has also directed the prison authorities to suo moto disclose the process of compensation to such prisoners as part of their obligation under the Right to Information Act. “Strangely the courts treated the MLA and the...

-The Indian Express Global Burden of Death: world health improves but progress is patchy; Bangladesh betters India in reducing maternal deaths Pune: Between 1990 and 2015, deaths of children under five have gone down by half worldwide but India has had the highest number of such deaths at 1.3 million in 2015. India has pulled down maternal deaths but Bangladesh has done better, according to the Global Burden of Disease 2015 study...

-The Hindu The Management Information System of MGNREGA is a way to providing data on implementation. But to achieve complete transparency it has to overcome several shortcomings The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is not only a pioneering livelihood security programme but also a great example of proactive disclosure of information through its Management Information System (MIS). It is the first transaction-based real-time system for any public works programme...

-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...