-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: The forests and environment department has started a plantation audit to find out the survival rate of saplings planted over the years within the city limits. A total of 9,67,362 saplings were planted in past three years but no one knows the survival rate of the saplings. Forest officials say a survival rate of 70 to 75 per cent is a healthy sign for any plantation drive. But the numbers...

-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...

-The Business Standard India is not working hard enough on climate change Shortly before World Environment Day on Wednesday, it was reported that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had soared to its highest level in three million years. Data captured by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that environmental incidence of the gas mostly responsible for trapping heat had crossed 400 parts per million - a level...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-The Times of India In English Vinglish, her big comeback movie last year, Sridevi's Shashi Godbole was a small-scale caterer in Pune before the movie's arc took her to the US. We saw her Efficiency at making boondi laddoos, we saw that her clients loved them and we know she made a little money from it. But we also saw how little her enterprise mattered to her family, and that her...