-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's budget speech has proMISed a hundred smart cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...

-Down to Earth Health experts blame Centre's over-emphasis on women's sterilisation for the Chhattisgarh tragedy THERE WAS nothing right about the sterilisation camp held on November 8 in Chhattisgarh's Takhatpur block of Bilaspur district. An overambitious government doctor-with unsterilised equipment and virtually no manpower-set out to conduct laparoscopic tubectomy on 83 women in an abandoned private hospital. The mass sterilisation led to the death of 13 women and left others critically ill. They were...

-ETV/ News 18 Claiming that the excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides destroyed Punjab in the two decades, volunteers from Punjab - once an agri-role model-have cautioned Madhya Pradesh against the same. These volunteers from Kheti Virasat MISsion - a group of volunteer activists from different fields working in Punjab for promoting organic farming, said this while participating in Vikalp Mela as part of Bhopal gas tragedy's 30th anniversary events in...

-FirstPost.com The MGNREGA rural job programme and other social welfare schemess will take a significant hit due to the 15 percent budget cut that the ministry of finance is believed to have proposed recently, social activists said Saturday. "You (the government) cut fund allocations from social and development programmes and then talk of development. That is so wrong. Such notion is MISplaced and insulting," said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at...

-The Hindu Jalna (Maharashtra): An angry silence greets one on entering the village of Dhasalgaon in Jalna district. Perpetuating agrarian crises for the last three years have made the once-proud farmers of this village poor. Despite the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party government's announcement that it seek a Rs. 4,500-crore package from the Centre, farmers in Jalna have wearied of the lip service that Mumbai's mandarins have been paying them for the...