NTPC Ltd, India’s biggest power producer, said it plans to spend as much as $15 billion (Rs 82, 521 crore) over a decade to secure overseas coal supplies as prices of the fuel tumble to a 19-month-low.

The utility may sign five- or 10-year contracts for the first time to import as much as 150 million metric tonnes of coal, Chairman Arup Roy Choudhury said by telephone from New Delhi on Tuesday.

“Nearly 9.7 million children in the South-East Asian region still do not get the most basic of vaccines like the third dose of DTP-containing vaccine. Immunisation is one of the most cost-effective public health interventions.

Growing opportunities through new funding as well as research and development initiatives should not go in vain due to the lack of perceived benefit. We need to increase public awareness and ensure that the public understands how immunisation saves lives,” WHO regional director for South-East Asia Dr. Samlee Plianbangchang has said.

The Stockholm Internati-onal Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production.

This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands.
The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa was leased in 2009 alone but other researches indicate that over 200 million hectares of land, which works out to roughly the size of western Europe, has already been leased out.

While the world has met the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of safe drinking water well in advance of the MDG 2015 deadline, India is among the ten countries after China with the largest population without access to improved drinking water.

According to the report issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unicef, India is home to 97 million people without an access to improved water supplies. Over all, there are still 780 million people without access to an improved drinking water source.

Itanagar: Researchers have discovered a new species of fish in Kalpangi River in Yazali under Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh.

The new species, Garra Kalpangi, was named after the river from where it was discovered, officials said today. The team included K Nebeshwar from Manipur University, Kenjum Bagra Research Officer at Arunachal Pradesh Biodiversity Board and D N Das of Rajiv Gandhi University. The discovery of the new species was mentioned in an article published in the February, 2012 edition of the Journal of Threatened Taxa, a wildlife and conservation journal.

The government is carrying out the National Agriculture Census (NAC), reaching out at the community level for the first time to study the overall scenario of the agriculture sector in the country. Besides collecting data on major areas of agriculture like production of major crops and livestock under Crop and Livestock Survey (CLS), the census will cover new areas including land utilisation, socio-economic condition, society formation, available facilities for farmers and development programmes being operated in the community level.