Antiquated food storage methods and technologies have been costing India dearly. The chairman of the Food Corporation of India (FCI), Siraj Hussain, admits that food worth Rs 50,000 crore is wasted every year. This comes roughly to 20 per cent of the total food produced by the country. Though this figure includes food that is lost in processing, packaging, transportation and even marketing, yet a substantial portion of it is lost...

Politicians, from the ruling party and opposition alike, are grappling with the problem of how to effectively communicate with their constituencies on the issue of high food inflation. One had thought it would be easy for the opposition to mount a campaign on rising prices against the ruling coalition, but it appears that inflation and its impact on the political economy is far more complex today than it was 10...

HIV prevalence in India and South Asia is growing among sex Workers and other high risk groups due to widespread failure to prevent stigmatising of people living with AIDS, according to a new report. Despite prevention and other efforts to reduce high-risk behaviours such as unprotected sex, buying and selling of sex, and injecting drug use, HIV vulnerability and risk remain high, says the report by a team from the...

In an upstairs classroom at a residential school in Mal, near Lucknow, the girls are revising for their exams. As the light starts to fade at the glassless windows, each girl takes a brightly coloured plastic lamp and carries it to her space on the floor. There is no electricity, but the lamps are solar powered. They have been donated jointly by Swedish company Ikea and the United Nations Children’s...

It's not China's special economic zones that chief minister Narendra Modi wants to replicate in Gujarat. The state government has taken a leaf out of the Chinese cultural revolution of late 1960s, when Mao Zedong formally attacked "western trained" medical system and floated the concept of ‘barefoot doctors'. The health ministry has decided to compensate for sharp shortage of allopathic doctors in the state by making large-scale appointment of barefoot...