-The Indian Express We need to make goat farming organised, tie it to agriculture and animal husbandry. This is an apocryphal story, but it is bizarre enough to be true. Once every four or five years, we have a livestock census. The latest one is the 19th, for 2012. This anecdote is about the 2007 version. In a village in West Bengal, there were 31 geese — 17 male, 14 female. An...

-The Hindu An all-woman team of reporters finds a massive online readership in the Bundelkhand region of northern India A homemade drone is shot down because the police think it belongs to the IS. A temple is built for a dacoit and his wife. A group of journalists are stalked for months until their story goes viral on the internet, after which a sleepy police station immediately swings into action. Reporting is...

-The Asian Age Is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) a “living monument” of the failure of the economic policies of the Indian National Congress which has ruled the country for all but roughly 14 years since August 1947? Or is it that the MGNREGA, a law enacted a decade ago which seeks to implement the world’s biggest and most ambitious job creating scheme, one of the few...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Researchers have detected what they say are snapshots of an imminent invasion of northern India by Hinglish that is set to shrink populations of monolingual Hindi and bilingual Hindi-and-English speakers. A study that examined dialogue on the Hindi reality television show Bigg Boss and everyday language practices has suggested that speakers of Hinglish, the hybridised version of Hindi peppered with English vocabulary, could out number speakers fluent in...

-The Hindu Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. One winter morning, in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, I was watching a group of Adivasi kids peering into their mobile phones. The early morning sun was mellow, and they were so engrossed that they did not notice me drawing near. “We are doing Bultoo...