-Deccan Chronicle Chennai: "With an estimated 8 billion mouths to feed by 2025, achieving zero hunger by that deadline is indeed challenging and this calls for arriving at precise solutions, particularly in ensuring access to nutritious food, not calories alone," said Dr M.S. Swaminathan, founder chairman of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai. "Family farming offers an effective and economic solution to help meet the challenge of making sure that...

-The Hindu Business Line While some farmers organisations have welcomed the Narendra Modi Government's stance in World Trade Organisation, some others feel that the Government's actions do not match its words with regard to its stance on food security and farm subsidies at home. "We totally support the Government's stand on WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement. In fact, in a country like ours, agriculture should be totally kept out of the purview of...

-The Hindu The gulf between statistics and substance is not easily bridged. The number of rape cases registered in the country may conceal the reality in two significant ways. First, only a small proportion of the rapes are reported at all. Secondly, a significant number of rape cases relate to consensual sex but have been criminalised by circumstances. The Hindu's six-month investigation into cases of sexual assault in Delhi has...

-The Times of India AHMEDABAD: The state government may be celebrating the next two weeks as the 'women's empowerment fortnight'. But the census 2011 data, which was released recently, shows that nearly 70.33% of the women in Gujarat who are in their prime working age group of 15 years to 34 years, are of no economic value for their families or state. A large section of these are literate and are...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...