-TheWeek.in Efforts on to substitute wheat and paddy crops with other market-driven crops Madhya Pradesh government launched a crop diversification promotion scheme with focus on natural farming and on substituting wheat and paddy crops with other crops that are suitable for Local climate and are market driven. The crop diversification scheme has been launched for three years starting the current financial year (2022-23), to encourage demand-based crop diversification, keeping in mind the economic...

-The Telegraph Lessons to take away from the two recent calamities in NorthEast It is never easy to rationalise tragedy. The two witnessed recently in the Northeast are no exceptions. One, the Assam floods in which the state’s two major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Barak, and their tributaries wreaked havoc, killing nearly 200 people and, at one point, putting close to 4.5 million people in danger of starvation and disease. Two,...

-The Hindu Dehumanisation is the likely outcome when humane aspects of governance get outsourced to technologies The right to live with dignity is a constitutional imperative. However, it rarely manifests in discussions surrounding digital initiatives in governance. Centralised data dashboards — valuable as they are — have become the go-to mode for assessing policies, relegating principles such as human dignity and hardships in accessing rights to its blind spots. Often when technological...

-Deccan Herald My colleague and I were in a District Education Office in Bihar. It had all the typical trappings of power. The officer we were meeting arrived with a litany of staff carrying his papers (and lunch box). In the short walk to his chamber, he barked orders to his staff, and as he sat on his chair and removed his Ray-Ban glasses, he commanded waiting visitors (mostly Local residents...

-Mongabay India/ Scroll.in Data from the state’s agriculture department shows that the production of wheat in the region has remained stagnant in the last four years. Rahul Singh Tomar is a farmer at Raisalpur village in the Narmadapuram district of Madhya Pradesh. The village is part of the Narmada valley and is famous for the fertile black soil that yields high-quality wheat. “The soil in our village is different,” Tomar told Mongabay-India. “Crops...