Hours after West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said his government would review the proposed nuclear plant at Haripur, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee Sunday said she will scrap the project if her party came to power in the state. 'Haripur is not the proper place for setting up a nuclear power plant because it is a densely populated area. Fishermen will also be affected. We will do it elsewhere,' Banerjee...

Eighty labourers, both men and women, are at work at Thiruvanduthurai village in Tiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu, about 325 km south of Chennai. They are digging a pond - about an acre wide and six feet deep - funded under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, or MGNREGS. Outside the work perimeter, two middle aged men look on, worried. P. Murugan and K. Govindaraj are farmers from the...

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) recently in New Delhi, India gathered more than 900 participants for an international conference to examine ways that agriculture can enhance the health and nutritional status of poor people in developing worlds. Scholars, Politicians and activists during the conference tried to exploit the nexus between agriculture, nutrition and health. Most people would say that agriculture is for growing food, and on one level, they are...

Anti-nuclear campaigners in India see the earthquake that hit Japan last week, which threatens the meltdown of the Fukushima atomic power facility there, as a wakeup call for this country’s ambitious nuclear power programme. When India completed a nuclear power cooperation deal with the United States in October 2008, it threw open a 270 billion U.S. dollar market for nuclear reactors. Now members of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group are queuing...

Food inflation, hovering in the double digits, may play spoilsport to India’s ability to continue its rapid economic growth. It is truly troubling that food still consumes half of the expenditure of the average Indian household. No wonder a sharp spike in onion prices has the potential to upset the political calculus of social stability. India’s biggest challenge still remains ensuring food and nutritional security to its masses. Notwithstanding the nation’s...