-The Indian Express With the spotlight on packaged foods’ failure to clear safety tests, The Indian Express samples 11 states and finds out how ill-equipped and understaffed their labs are. For a processed food market estimated at Rs 7.34 lakh crore by the Annual Survey of Industries, 72 state labs and 68 private ones with National Accrediation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) accreditation are conducting tests in India’s 640...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The summer monsoon weakened across large swathes of India in the past century, scientists said today, linking the reductions in rainfall to hitherto-unobserved trends that they say portend a dangerous drying of the Indian subcontinent. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said they had identified a significant weakening trend in summer rainfall between 1901 and 1912 over central and northern India, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basins and...

-The Economic Times Pune | NEW DELHI | KOLKATA: Despite the forecast of a deficient monsoon, coupled with its poor start, farmers are trying to maximise their returns. Choosing the crops that have high market prices is their strategy, shows the meager sowing taken place so far in the regions that have received monsoon and pre-monsoon showers. Crops like pulses, groundnut, chillies, onions, whose market rates have been ruling high, are...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: The gender gap in the world of tipplers is fast shrinking. Recent studies show that more female students than males in Spain are likely to binge-drink, and the percentage of women arrested for drunk driving increased by 30% within a decade in the US. In India, in the absence of any study or statistics, accidents like the one caused by Chembur corporate lawyer Janhvi Gadkar prove that...