About 6,348 tons of foodgrain stored in various government outlets across the country were damaged primarily due to storage pest attack and leakages in godowns in 2010-11, a fact which does not go down well for the country's food security. “The foodgrain get damaged due to various reasons such as storage pest attack, leakages in godowns, procurement of poor quality stocks, during movement of stocks, exposure to rains, floods, etc,” Union...

Tamil Nadu offers maximum economic freedom and Bihar the least among 20 of India's big states, according to a study released on Tuesday. The Economic Freedom of the States in India 2011 ranked the states based on the extent of wealth, administrative and social parameters in 2009. The USbased Cato Institute published the rankings in association with Indicus Analytics and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. Both the states retained their positions...

Why don’t we see more Indian language content on the internet? For instance, there are over 200 odd million people who can read and write in Hindi. But Hindi doesn’t figure in any listing of the top ten languages used on the internet globally. Japanese, a cussedly difficult language to read or write, makes it to the top five. This, from a country with less than one-tenth the population of India. It...

As the demand for a ban on Endosulfan in India is gaining pitch and Karnataka being the latest state to ban the pesticide, the Pesticide Manufacturers and Formulators Association of India (PMFAI) is going around crying foul. They are leaving no stone unturned to save endosulfan. Press meets across the country and plugged newspaper reports maligning studies that have indicted endosulfan in the past is a desperate attempt to save...

Politicians admit breaking election law: ‘yes, that's the great thing about democracy' Politicians and their aides in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh admitted to violating election law to influence voters in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls through payments in the form of cash, goods, or services, according to a revealing cable sent to the State Department by Frederick J. Kaplan, Acting Principal Officer of the U.S. Consulate-General in Chennai. In...