-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's paddy Farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than paddy itself. "We used to sell paddy at...

-Business Standard About 6.2 MT of paddy have been reportedly arrived in the societies across the state Raipur: With paddy procurement for the kharif marketing season 2014-15 in Chhattisgarh finally coming to an end at midnight, about 6.2 million tonnes (MT) of paddy have been reportedly arrived in the societies across the state. The paddy procured this year was over 20 per cent less than the paddy purchased by the Chhattisgarh in the...

-Outlook New Delhi: There is no central programme as popular as MNREGA; this was some state governments' message to the Centre as they conveyed their displeasure over the fund crunch for the scheme. On the occasion of 10th MNREGA Divas celebrations today, these states narrated how the rural job scheme did "exceptionally well" in the insurgency-hit areas of the country particularly in the northeast and Naxal-affected districts. The northeastern states conveyed their difficulties...

-Down to Earth Instead of burning paddy straw, Farmers in Haryana's Panipat district are using it to farm mushrooms. This has eased pollution, too Athick haze would eclipse the sun throughout the day from late October to early November," says Naresh Kumar of Puthar village in Haryana's Panipat district. Sitting beside neatly piled up paddy straw in his small 0.2 hectare field, the 40-year-old Farmer is reminiscing about the common practice of...

-Outlook A parsing of the recent expert report on food security reveals that most of its solutions do not meet the greater public good. The BJP's election manifesto had stated "that ‘universal food security' is integral to national security. BJP will take steps to ensure that the benefits of the scheme reach the common man and that the right to food does not remain an act on paper or a political...