-Scroll.in The government’s choice of partners has raised concerns. In June 2018, the Andhra Pradesh government announced an ambitious programme to bring all 80 lakh hectares of its cultivable land under agroecological farming by 2024. Agroecology emphasises minimising external, artificial inputs by using resources available in the local ecosystem so as to make farming sustainable and environment-friendly. Called Andhra Pradesh Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming, the programme seeks to wean away 60...

-The Hindu The farming work is being taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana Thiruvananthapuram: A 13.5-acre ‘padasekharam’ in Plavodu ward of Pulimath grama panchayat that remained fallow for years is being transformed into a paddy field as part of the Kudumbashree District Mission’s fallow less-village activities. Taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana, the organic paddy...

-The Hindu Journalist-author Meena Menon on the crisis of cotton and why India needs to go back to desi varieties There’s a pithy summing up of Bt Cotton in Meena Menon’s 2018 article ‘A lost cotton heritage’. “Bt cotton is like Fair and Lovely,” Kamal Kishore Dhiran, an organic cotton farmer, tells the journalist and author. “Does it really change you or make you fair? Similarly Bt cotton doesn’t address the main...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-TheNewsMinute.com Due to poverty and dependence on government rations, the communities had become malnourished and prone to several non-communicable diseases. But they soon realised that the solution to their woes was in their past. Three years ago, officials of the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary at Idukki in Kerala conducted a medical camp for the tribal natives residing in the sanctuary. While the officials were expecting to see widespread malnutrition and related ailments, the...