-The Indian Express The Central government’s move to fix cotton seed prices and trait fees sends wrong signals. 2015 will go down as a year that has seen all the rules of free trade being given the go-by when it comes to agriculture. The lead for it, significantly, has come from the Centre, whether in the form of not allowing exports of onion at below $ 700 a tonne or imposing stockholding...

-DNA Indian municipalities can adopt the European Union model to achieve zero landfill disposal Budapest: Today, streets and corners littered with garbage are a common sight in almost every Indian city. What’s more, when municipalities actually pick up the trash, they dump it directly in landfills. Until a few months ago when I moved to Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, I thought this situation was inevitable. Then, I travelled to...

-GovernanceNow.com A survey in drought-hit Bundelkhand paints a startling picture of farmers in distress Bundelkhand, the land of famous warriors Alha and Udal, is entrapped in an unending battle. But unlike 1857, today there is no ‘harbola’ to tell the stories of sacrifices. Then, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan wrote, “Bundele harbolon ke munh hamne suni kahani thi, khoob ladi mardani voh to Jhansi wali rani thi (from the mouths of storytellers of...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Women have the right to have safe and decent toilets at all convenient places, observed the Bombay high court on Wednesday upholding the "right to pee" for women who are outdoors. "Women have the right to safe and clean toilets which in a way impacts their right to live with human dignity,'' said a bench of Justice Abhay Oka and Justice Revati Mohite-Dere in their judgment. "One...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: NITI Aayog, established as the government's think tank, could soon become planning body for the Centre and states, similar to its predecessor — the erstwhile Planning Commission. However, the institution would adopt a bottom to top approach as it moves on from five year plans to longterm perspective planning. This would keep it in sync with the government's focus on cooperative federalism. A senior government official told ET that...