-The Hindu The Odisha government has made the right announcements to improve the plight of migrant workers, but a lot more needs to be done In December 2013, a labourer chopped off the palms of two migrant workers from western Odisha. He had paid them an advance for working in the brick kilns of Hyderabad and did not take kindly to their arguing with him about the payment and place of work....

-The Hindu Business Line   The future of indigenous cattle lies in creating incentives to rear them India's indigenous cattle population has fallen by 8.9 per cent between 2007 and 2012 even as the numbers of exotic/crossbred cows and female buffaloes have gone up by 28.8 and 8 per cent respectively, according to the Agriculture Ministry's latest Livestock Census. Disturbing though this may seem to some, the trend is a reflection of rational...

-IPS News MALKANGIRI (Odisha)- Scattered across 31 remote hilltop villages on a mountain range that towers 1,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level, in the Malkangiri district of India's eastern Odisha state, the Upper Bonda people are considered one of this country's most ancient tribes, having barely altered their lifestyle in over a thousand years. Resistant to contact with the outside world and fiercely skeptical of modern development, this community of under...

-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...

-The Business Standard States need to create alternative marketing structures for farm produce since middlemen also provide vital services that are otherwise unavailable to the farmer   One of the issues often raised in the context of high food inflation is the pressing need to change the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMC), the marketing boards established by state governments. The earlier United Progressive Alliance government had asked the Congress-ruled states to remove fruit...