-The Times of India KARNAL (HARYANA): "Poo to Power" may sound awkward and impractical, but Aditya Aggarwal and his brother Amit have done it in Karnal, Haryana. Two industries, one producing wire nails and another tinner rivets, owned by the family run on 100% electricity produced from cattle dung they get from nearby 'gaushalas' or cow sheds. The cattle dung-based power plant started in 2014 and that too without government support....

-The Times of India CHENNAI: Poultry farmers can now afford to count their profits before their chickens hatch - and they are big, with chickens weighing on average twice as much as they did 50 years ago. The broiler chicken of today, a product of controlled breeding, weighs around 2.2kg as compared to 1.2kg before 1960, say veterinarians and chicken farm owners. Contract farming started in India in the early 1960s, taking...

The ends may justify the means, but let's be clear - in rural India, extremes of coercion are being used to encourage toilet use Robert Chambers recently wrote that community-led total sanitation is leading to a development revolution, especially in south Asia. I agree with his assessment of sanitation's importance. In practice, however, the success of community-led efforts often hinges on the use of outright coercion. In my experience, the measures...