-The Indian Express The CWC has sent a strong note to Water Resources Minister Uma Bharati, complaining against the committee’s recommendations. The employees of the Central Water Commission (CWC) have slammed the Mihir Shah panel, calling its recommendations on water reforms “conceptually flawed”, “anti-development” and something that will result in “disaster of unmatched proportions”. The seven-member expert panel, headed by Mihir Shah, former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, was appointed by the...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...

-Business Standard Recent trends indicate any such moderation would not be across the board or without riders: Experts New Delhi: Contrary to some perceptions, consumer price index (CPI)-based inflation might not ease sharply after kharif crops arrive in the markets. On the other hand, wholesale price index (WPI)-based inflation could see a rise, due to an increase in prices of commodities and metals. CPI inflation rose to 6.07 per cent in July, highest since...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-Earth Island Journal It’s too early to hail Sikkim’s transition to chemicals-free agriculture an outright success, say observers Sikkim, the picturesque northeastern Indian state in the eastern Himalayas, announced in January that it had transitioned completely to organic agriculture — the first state in the South Asian nation to do so. The process of shifting to organic agriculture was initiated by the state government 13 years ago when it launched the Sikkim Organic...