-The Hindustan Times Rubina appears much older than the 40 years she admits to. She does not look you in the eye; she is hardly audible, and often trembles. Her hut, on the outskirts of Guhana village in Haryana's Mewat district, is surrounded by garbage heaps and excreta. There is no water or electricity and the hut is filled with acrid smoke from the cooking fire. "This is how our stories...

-The Hindu Jardhar village comprises of nearly 26 small hamlets in Uttarakhand. Like hundreds of villages in the country agriculture is a major occupation here. But the village is known for more than just agriculture. It houses some of the country's best and ‘lost' ancient seed varieties. This is thanks to Mr. Vijay Jardhari, a small farmer and founder of seed saving movement called Beej Bachao Andolan (seed savers movement), who has managed...

-The Guardian Rice conservationist Debal Deb grapples with 'mindless Indian elite' to reintroduce genetically diverse, drought-tolerant varieties   Fifty years ago, every Indian village would probably have grown a dozen or more rice varieties that grew nowhere else. Passed down from generation to generation and family to family, there would have been a local variety for every soil and taste - rice that would grow well in droughts or deep floods, which had...

-The Hindu     Even a cursory look at how Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have fared will tell us how the mere formation of a smaller State is no guarantee for better lives for those groups for whom these States have been created Smaller States have been the new political mode of addressing basic issues that were otherwise left unresolved. However, fighting for a new state and reconstructing on a more sustainable democratic content...

-Down to Earth Benefits of government schemes and policies go to big farmers, shows survey undertaken by CSDS on behalf of farmers' association A study by a premier social sciences research institute reinforces what policymakers and media have been talking about the past few years-that India is going through a deep agrarian crisis. The Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), based in Delhi, found that given an option majority of farmers...