-The Hindu One must agree with certain aspects of Prof. Krishna Kumar’s centrepiece in The Hindu on June 30, 2012 (“A messy corner of India’s modernity”), on the dilemma of the schoolteacher in denying admission to child brides but at the same time examine some of his propositions from the perspective of girls who are exercising agency to continue in the education system. As he has stated, schools are not to be...

While any loss in production following the dry spell will further hit the growth story, it will also push up food inflation. considerably. Once again the rain gods are playing truant. With 31 per cent shortfall in June, and with an expectation of only 70 per cent of the predicted 96 per cent rainfall for the July-August months, crucial for farming operations, kharif sowings have already been hit.   In June alone,...

-The Indian Express It is not just 21 cartoons that have been deemed “inappropriate” for NCERT textbooks. The Thorat Committee has frowned on much more, disapproving of “ too many cartoons of Mrs Indira Gandhi” in the Class XII textbooks, and objecting to some Amul advertisements. Set up in May following MPs’ objections to political cartoons in textbooks, the six-member committee headed by ICSSR chairman S K Thorat vetted six textbooks that...

-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 Telegraph When the deadly gas was spreading havoc in Bhopal, Arjun Singh was hundreds of miles away — praying. Hours after the leaking methyl isocyanate gas had left a trail of death in the Madhya Pradesh capital, the state’s then chief minister had taken a flight to Allahabad, where he visited the chapel of his childhood school to pray for “moral courage”. The startling revelation comes in Arjun’s yet-to-be-released memoirs, A Grain...