Delhi’s mayor wants owners of industrial units in and around the city to shut down a month before the October 3-14 Commonwealth Games to give the nation’s capital a cleaner and "world class" look. After all, he says, "the Chinese did the same" ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The mayor, Dr Kanwar Sain, said in his appeal on Wednesday that traders and industrial unit owners should cooperate in the "national...

India is expected to maintain last year’s record of being the world’s largest milk producer, with an estimated 110 million tonnes in 2008-09. The country achieved the distinction with the production of 104.8 million tonnes in the 2007-08, according to a spokesman of the National Dairy Development Board. The spokesman said the world’s milk production was expected to be 688 million tonnes in 2008-09, a marginal 1.7 per cent increase...

The current food inflation is a result of food output growth not keeping pace with population growth Few recall that, just last month, there was a food security summit in Rome. In sharp contrast to the almost overwhelming coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit, it attracted far lesser attention from the heads of governments, as also from the media. This is somewhat strange as a food (and water) crisis can hit...

Some of the poor states in the country that were the focus of the big-ticket National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) have actually ended up being discriminated against in the Central allocation as compared to funds released to some of the rich and efficient states that were already high on the basic health parameters. This has been found in a review of NRHM, the UPA government's most ambitious welfare scheme after...

Minutes before curtains were drawn on state legislature's winter session, Chief Minister Ashok Chavan announced a Rs 10,000 crore package for Vidarbha. "This a time-bound programme for all-round development of the region and will be implemented in three years," said Chavan assuring the house that he would personally monitor it in co-ordination with the chief secretary. A quick analysis of the package, however, showed it was a re-jig of ongoing...