-The Hindu Bijapur (Karnataka): Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister H.K. Patil has said that the State government was contemplating a policy to ensure the construction of bathrooms along with toilets in rural areas. Addressing presspersons here on Sunday, he said that to enhance the living standards of rural people, it was essential to provide these basic facilities. Claiming that bathrooms, like toilets, were also equally important for the development of the rural...

-Live Mint Numbers confirm Bihar's structural shift away from agriculture, with sharp increase in share of services sector Bihar has revised its economic growth for 2012-13 to 14.48%, five percentage points higher than what was initially forecast, according to two officials at the state's directorate of statistics. The new numbers confirm the state's structural shift away from agriculture, with a sharp increase in the share of the tertiary or services sector. The data...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: For the Akhilesh Yadav government, the burgeoning unemployment problem comes as a daunting challenge. The 66th round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report puts the projection of unemployed youth in Uttar Pradesh in the age group of 15-35 at whopping 1 crore by the end of the ongoing 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17). They will be in addition to the backlog of around 32...

-The Hindu Uttarakhand reiterates that our rulers have contemptuous disregard for the advice of the best scientists and would rather listen to contractors and builders to whom they are beholden for funds In the early 1980s, while doing research on the environmental history of Uttarakhand, I sometimes visited the library of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun. Most of the journals in the library dealt with geology and earth sciences,...

-Frontline Professor Sukhpal Singh, a faculty member of the Centre for Management of Agriculture at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, has been researching and documenting the process of contract farming and food supply chains in India for more than a decade. He is of the view that the small farmer is being excluded in the method currently in place, which defeats the very purpose of improving Indian agriculture. Sukhpal Singh,...