-The Hindu Business Line   Small and marginal farmers in rainfed regions are trapped in a losing battle with agriculture - and with life The lot of the poor Indian farmer keeps deteriorating with the passage of time. According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data released on December 19, 2014, during the last decade, the bloated debt of Indian agricultural households increased almost 400 per cent Even the number of heavily...

-Business Standard While the revised estimates of the gross domestic product (GDP) suggest the Indian economy turned the corner in 2013-14, concerns remain over the durability of this nascent recovery. Particularly worrying is the recent slowdown in rural wage growth, which signals a weakening of rural demand. Growth in rural wages, which had averaged 18 per cent in the previous few years, fell to less than five per cent in September...

-PTI Mumbai: Seasonal spurt in vegetable prices next month could partly reverse the benefits of low global oil prices reducing inflation and increasing disposable incomes, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) warned on Tuesday. "The sharp reduction in oil prices as well as in inflation is likely to increase personal disposable incomes and improve domestic demand conditions in the year ahead," the central bank said in its monetary policy document. Inflation, excluding food...

-Business Standard Petition claims private parties outsourced to collect citizens' data can misuse massive personal information in their hands The Supreme Court asked the Centre on Monday to state within two weeks its stand on the unique identification (UID) project, Aadhaar. A Bench headed by Chief Justice H L Dattu was hearing a new public interest litigation (PIL) challenging the project. According to the petition moved by Mathew Thomas, private parties who have...

-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's paddy farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than paddy itself. "We used to sell paddy at...