-The Hindu Average size of landholding has shrunk to 0.80 hectares during 2010-11 Chennai: Land available for farming in Tamil Nadu is going down year by year. There seems no end to fragmentation. According to the latest report of the Department of Evaluation and Applied Research (DEAR) on the State's economic appraisal for the period from 2011-12 to 2013-14, the average size of landholding has shrunk from 1.45 hectares during 1970-71 to 0.80...

-FirstPost.com Farmer suicides haven't gone up in Maharashtra: Why is Modi tweaking data? Prime Minister Narendra Modi is aggressively attempting to make the high incidence of Farmers's suicide in Maharashtra an important election issue. The BJP is probably trying to make inroads in rural Maharashtra where it is not known to be strong traditionally. Modi has quoted government statistics to suggest Maharashtra has had more than 10 Farmers committing suicide every day. Needless...

-Bloomberg.com Savitri Rai winces as she recounts how police beat her when she protested against groundwater extraction at a Coca-Cola Co. (KO) plant near her farm in India. A decade later, she said her water supplies keep dwindling. "We have to dig ever deeper wells," the 60-year-old said outside her mud house in Mehadiganj village in Uttar Pradesh state, blaming the beverage company's bottling line a kilometer (0.6 miles) away. Coca-Cola, which...

-Down to Earth Sivasankaran's land grabbing spree has threatened millions of livelihoods, says report Indian origin businessman Chinnakannan Sivasankaran has engaged in aggressive land grabbing of more than half a million hectares across Africa, Asia and South America, putting millions of livelihoods at risk. This was revealed in a detailed report released by Barcelona-based non-profit GRAIN on Tuesday. The report says Sivasankaran diverted 0.56 million hectares of food-producing land to production of palm...

-FirstPost.com With the hype of his Madison Square Garden show overshadowing everything else, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's US visit was dubbed as a great bilateral victory for India. As the popular consensus went, Modi wowed both the Indian Americans and American politicians and even managed to get a joint op-ed article with President Barack Obama in the Washington Post stressing the importance of the partnership between the two countries. Was it really...