Despite high prices of fruits and vegetables, India's area under horticultural crops - mainly fruits, vegetables, spices and flowers - has doubled in around twenty years (between 1991-92 and 2012-13). This has resulted in increase in production of horticultural crops nearly threefold (2.8 times). A new report from the Ministry of Agriculture says that the area under horticultural crops during this period rose from 12.77 million hectares to 23.69 million...

-The Hindu In the first six months of 2014, Facebook has restricted access to nearly 5,000 pieces of information from India on its webSITe. With increasing number of Indians getting hooked to sharing content on Facebook, there has been a steady rise in requests to the social networking SITe from the government and other agencies to censor posts. In the first six months of 2014, Facebook has restricted access to nearly 5,000 pieces...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a country where obeSITy and diabetes, on account of high intake of fatty food, is turning into an epidemic, a unique health crisis is faced by few others. Top nutritionists working at AIIMS say the fat intake among rural population continues to be significantly lower than the Recommendatory Dietary Allowance (RDA) leading to serious health issues in them. In last 20-30 years, scientists claim, the...

-The Indian Express For the last 10 years, farmers in India benefited from both increased production and higher price realisations - leading to rising rural incomes and declining poverty rates. That happy story may now be near its end - which could be the precursor to a renewed crisis in agriculture. The main reason is declining global prices for most agri-commodities (see Table 1). Over the last five-six months, corn, wheat and...

-IANS Kolkata: Climate change is causing toxic metals trapped in the sediment beds of the Hooghly estuary in the Indian Sunderbans to leach out into the water system due to changes in ocean chemistry, say scientists, warning of potential human health hazards. They predict that after about 30 years, increasing ocean acidification - another dark side of spiked atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide - could in fact unlock the entire stock of...