-The Business Standard Government taking steps to offer cooking gas to all rural households India plans to provide affordable electricity to all households in the next five years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said today. "The Government of India aims to provide 24x7 electricity to all households in the country and affordable access to electricity in the next 5 years," he said inaugurating an International Seminar on Energy Access organised by the Ministry of...
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Notifying Farming as an Essential Service: An Authoritarian Manoeuvre-SAHRDC
-Economic and Political Weekly The Government of India is considering a proposal to notify farming as an essential service. This is ostensibly to bring drought relief to farmers suffering from a weak monsoon - a laudable goal indeed. However, if farming is deemed an "essential service", farmers and farm workers could lose many of their political and civic rights because the government can then invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act to...
More »Laissez-Faire Failing World’s Dwindling Water Resources-Stephen Leahy
-IPS News UXBRIDGE, Canada- Growing water shortages in many countries are a major threat to global security and development and should be a top priority at the U.N. Security Council, a panel of experts said in a new report. However, that report ignores the biggest threat to water security: neoliberal policies of the free market economic system laying waste to the natural world and turning water into a commodity, activists counter. China...
More »Maharahstra, TN account for 36% of sub-standard drugs -Kounteya Sinha
-The Times of India Almost one in three drugs (36%) found "not of standard quality" from across India last year were from Maharashtra (23%) and Tamil Nadu (13%) alone. Around 9.2% of the rest of the sub-standard quality drugs were from Kerala, Gujarat (8.5%), Karnataka (7.2%), Uttar Pradesh (6.9%), Jammu & Kashmir (6.08%) and Rajasthan (5.8%). Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Tuesday that of the 48, 082 drug samples tested...
More »We should not forget that prices which consumers pay are not what farmers get
-The Times of India Union steel minister Beni Prasad Verma's claim, that he was happy with inflation as higher food prices have helped farmers, borders on the ludicrous. A few weeks back P Chidambaram also attracted flak when he said that consumers have to pay more for sugar, rice and wheat as procurement prices are raised to benefit farmers. Linkages between high food prices and farmers' welfare is dubious because there...
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