-The Hindu Business Line A tribal woman shows farmers how to transform their lives by adopting efficient and environmentally friendly practices “I don’t know your name, Collector Sahib, but you are very welcome in our village,” says Leelaben Karsanbhai, 30. Like a seasoned speaker, she is addressing a meeting of 100-odd villagers and all the bada sahib who have descended on the tribal village of Katarvad, 130 km east of Vadodara, Gujarat,...

-DNA Wondering about the plight of the rural population facing successive droughts which has to buy pulses, South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) laments how no benefit of the price hike is reaching actual pulse farmers. While most link the current tur (pigeon pea) dal crisis with raging market prices, storage issues, hoarding and economics, a new study highlighting the making of the crisis - by South Asia Network...

-Hindustan Times A migrant labourer not long ago, 37-year-old Sitaram Majhi is now a successful farmer. As Odisha’s agricultural fields starve for water due to drought conditions this year, Majhi never had a problem watering his crop in Kharamal village in Bargarh district’s parched Paikmal block, more than 500 km from Bhubaneswar. Equipped with chahala – a small traditional water harvesting structure – and a vermi-compost pit the three-acre farm, on which he...

-The Times of India RAJKOT/AHMEDABAD: Just a week ago, lakhs of farmers across Gujarat were on the verge of losing their standing crop due to a prolonged dry spell. However, five days of incessant rainfall has come as a saviour. Agriculturists say that the wet spell at the fag end of monsoon will now help their kharif crops survive. The rains have resulted in 80 big and small dams, especially in Saurashtra, overflowing,...

-Business Standard This is our season of despair. This year, it would seem, the gods have been most unkind to Indian farmers. Early in the year came the weird weather events, like hailstorms and freak and untimely rains that destroyed standing crops. Nobody knew what was happening. After all, each year we witness a natural weather phenomenon called the "western disturbance" - winds that emanate from the Mediterranean and travel eastward...