Indian agriculture needs Rs 1,08,000 crore to fight climate change in the next five years to ensure food for all at a reasonable price by 2020. To prevent food catastrophe, the agriculture ministry has asked the funds for implementing National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture under the Prime Minister's National Action Plan on Climate Change. Over 60% of the money will be spent on developing new technologies, crop varieties and new practices...

PAC member N.K. Singh recuses himself from meetings to avoid conflict of interest Two editors, Vinod Mehta of Outlook and Manu Joseph of Open magazine, told the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament on Monday it was their journalistic duty to place in the public domain the transcripts of tapped conversations between corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and others which had a direct bearing on the 2G spectrum allocation scandal. After the meeting, PAC...

Promises action “to allay fears and insecurity Christians are experiencing” Chief Ministers will be asked to deal firmly with anti-Christian violence Promises to act on the Saldanha report on violence against minorities in Karnataka Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured a Christian delegation on Saturday that he was trying to evolve a consensus on granting Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims. He also said he would ask Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram...

With political parties across the spectrum asking the government to conduct a socio-economic survey of different communities, the government is considering clubbing the below poverty line (BPL) survey with the caste census. “A recent meeting between the Rural Development Ministry and the Registrar General of India (RGI) explored the possibility of carrying out the BPL survey along with the caste census as an alternative to the community wise socio-economic survey,” a...

Meeting of Secretaries convened for 8 March; data on 1,000 officers already in Union Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekhar is calling a meeting of union secretaries here on 8 March to convey to them a government decision making it mandatory for bureaucrats to put details of the moveable and immoveable property they own on a government website. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been pushing for this as part of a promised clean-up...