-The Hindu     The Kerala government has not learnt anything from the Attappady tragedy. Nutrition levels of women and children, most of them tribals, continue to remain dismal in the area At the Agali Community Health Centre in Attappady, Palakkad district, Kerala, Kavitha tends to her four-year-old child lying listlessly on the cot, critically ill. The doctor says the child is severely malnourished. He also says there are eight such infants and children,...

-The Hindu Indentured labour may be a forgotten part of our colonial economic history but Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still sending ‘Girmitya' to toil in distant lands The descendants of indentured labourers, who migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to erstwhile colonies, recently met at The Hague in the Netherlands to commemorate 140 years of migration - perpetuated through a system popularly known as ‘Girmit.' They gathered from all...

-The Hindu     Shonali Muthalaly and Anusha Parthasarathy join the queue at an Amma Unavagam in the city and sample the fare as early as seven in the morning We are in the queue at 6.30 a.m. That's if you can call this a queue. Three people stand around sleepily. So much for our mental image of waiting in a hungry Oliver Twist-like queue for idlis! Two more people saunter into the Alwarpet...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The environment ministry's Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) has cleared field trials for genetically modified rice, wheat, maize and castor for the Kharif season of 2013. The clearances - some of them extension of existing clearances that stood to lapse with state governments opposing field trials and others for relocating trial sites - come while the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill is pending before the...

-Live Mint/ Bloomberg Conflicts between industry and farmers getting worse as water becomes more and more scarce Sachin Ingale slipped out of his family's two-room, white-painted mud hut about 4pm and walked into their farm field where the 22-year-old took a deep swig of pesticide from a plastic bottle. He died later that evening. Four months later, the mercury is pushing 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in his village in...