-The Hindu Business Line Plan to convert more rice fallow land to pulses, oilseeds during rabi season New Delhi: The government has set a foodgrain target of 285.2 million tonnes (mt) for 2018-19, which is marginally higher than the expected production in 2017-18, the agriculture ministry said here on Tuesday. As per the fourth advance estimates released by the Government last month, the foodgrain harvest in 2017-18 would be around 284.83 mt, aided...
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More river stretches critically polluted: CPCB -Jacob Koshy
-The Times of India Maharashtra, Assam, Gujarat account for 117 sections The number of polluted stretches in India’s rivers has increased to 351 from 302 two years ago, and the number of critically polluted stretches — where water quality indicators are the poorest — has gone up to 45 from 34, according to an assessment by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). While the ?20,000 crore clean-up of the Ganga may be the...
More »The power of Kudumbashree -Brinda Karat
-The Hindu The Kerala model can be implemented across India with the same secular and gender-sensitive spirit Kumari died on September 1. She had contracted leptospirosis while doing relief work in Kerala after the floods, away from her own home which had not been affected. She was a health volunteer and prominent member of the Kudumbashree Mission in her panchayat in Ernakulum district. Kumari’s work and life symbolises the spirit of Kerala...
More »The social value of religious and political dissent -Rajeev Bhargava
-The Hindu Dissenters of the past in India were great moral agitators, introducing social, intellectual and spiritual turbulence in public life. Would they have survived today? Dissent is not only the “safety valve of democracy”, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reminded us, but vital for meaningful social life. Societies stultify when everyone converges on a single opinion or when official stories go unchallenged. Flaws congeal and social rot sets in. Right or wrong,...
More »After the deluge, Kerala's next crisis: Dying earthworms -KR Rajeev
-The Times of India KOZHIKODE: Farmer Sanmathy Raj was walking to his field last week when he stopped short. Dead earthworms covered the ground. “I couldn’t walk without stepping on them,” he said. It’s normal for earthworms to creep out of the soil after rains, but Kolavayal, Raj’s village in Kerala’s Wayanad district, has been dry since flood waters receded. Baffling as the scene was, mass earthworm deaths have also been reported...
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