-PTI A group of American students led by an Indian has developed a low-cost way to improve the yield of agricultural produce for the farmers and reduce the use of fertilizers in Telangana through desilting of ponds. "A group of students from here in a year-long study in Telangana have found that silt from ponds reduces the use of fertilizers by 36 per cent and increases the crop yield by nearly 50...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: BiocheMISt Thuppil Venkatesh says he is not surprised by claims of food safety regulators in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi that they have detected lead, a potential toxin to humans, in Maggi noodles. For over a decade, Venkatesh, professor emeritus at St John's Medical College, Bangalore, has been trying to warn the country about what he says are dangerous levels of lead in the environment that may slip into...

-The Indian Express It can be strengthened —by the collection of taxes at the local level, for instance. Democratic decentralisation, conceived two decades ago, seems to be a lost cause at first sight. Beyond lip service by politicians, neither panchayats nor municipalities have captured the public imagination as viable, responsive, accountable institutions of government. Just after the Karnataka panchayat elections, which ended on June 2, the continued disempowerment of local governments is...

-Livemint.com Trade minister Nirmala Sitharaman will raise the issue at an informal meeting of WTO trade ministers in Paris on Thursday New Delhi: Hardening its stand on the food security issue, India will insist that countries agree to a permanent solution to the dispute over public stockholding of foodgrains by December as originally proMISed, even though developing nations have been granted an indefinite interim reprieve. Trade minister Nirmala Sitharaman will raise the...

-Down to Earth Sikkim will be the first Indian state to go wholly organic. But lack of markets can become counterproductive Applause echoed in the Lok Sabha in the budget session when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took pride in announcing Sikkim as the first Indian state to go wholly organic. In his speech, he acknowledged the “hard work that the farmers of Sikkim had put in” and added, “If a small state...