-The Indian Express In an article in these columns (‘A fertile mess', IE, December 11), Ashok Gulati says India has landed its fertiliser industry in a mess because of rising subsidies, lagging investment, unbalanced use of fertilisers and diversion of urea for other uses, among other things. He blames it all on administered pricing and subsidy costs, and advocates the increase of urea prices or cash transfer of the fertiliser subsidy...

-Livemint.com Some 50,000 women in India died during childbirth and from pregnancy-related complications in 2013, according to estimates by United Nations agencies Melbourne/Mumbai: Sita Devi was in labour when her family paid the day's first bribe. The wife of Shivvaran Pal, a subsistence farmer whom she'd married at 15, Sita worked on their land and earned a monthly wage of Rs.1,000, about $16, cooking school lunches. By 23, she had three daughters...

-Economic and Political Weekly India's scheduled tribes are among the most deprived socio-economic groups and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme has great potential in tribal areas. While the Andhra Pradesh government has made an effort to ensure implementation of the scheme in the scheduled areas, the gap between administrative orders and the grass-roots level is wide. This article lists measures that could radically improve implementation of the scheme...

-The Hindu Business Line   Cocoa has enriched the lifestyle of one lakh farmers in the four southern States When Cadbury India (now Mondelez India Foods Ltd) representatives approached Sabapathy, a coconut farmer at Sethumadai village, 16 km from Pollachi in Tamil Nadu, with some cocoa seedling to be raised as an intercrop in his coconut grove, Sabapathy says he was not interested at all. "They did not give up and I ultimately gave...

-The Asian Age There was a news report not so long ago that ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), an international organisation and part of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) consortium, had entered into an agreement with Gubba Cold Storage Ltd. to set up a private seed bank, the first of its kind in India. No details were available of the terms and conditions under...