Media persons from all over the country have a great opportunity to witness the dance of democracy in Jaipur beginning Gandhi Jayanti. A peaceful ‘dharna’ organized by grassroots organizations like the MKSS and RTI Manch, among others, is already attracting some of India’s top writers, editors, development thinkers and civil society activists, besides thousands of common people from all across Rajasthan. The movement will continue indefinitely from October 2 onwards...

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...

With a gas-guzzler of an economy, India had been spending tens of billions of dollars annually to import petroleum. And so its 2009 policy on biofuels mandated that by 2017, India would have enough biofuel production to cover at least 20 percent of the country’s oil consumption. The government has in fact been encouraging the cultivation of jatropha curcas for the past seven years, believing that would be the fastest way...

Around 22 districts in Rajasthan have been identified as those requiring immediate attention in terms of food security, according to the food security atlas of rural Rajasthan released jointly by the Institute of Human Development and the United Nation's World Food Programme (UNWFP) on Friday. The atlas further mentions the need of immediate, intensive intervention in ten out of these 22 districts to improve food and nutrition security. The atlas...

The number of hungry people in the world dropped about 10 percent for the first time in 15 years to below 1 billion but the figure is still "unacceptable," the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report. According to a report titled "The State of Food Insecurity in the World," which will be jointly published by FAO and World Food Program (WFP) in October, about 925 million people...