-The Hindu Employment in villages is largely in agriculture sector, while industrial employment is less than four per cent. The Standing Conference of Public Enterprises (SCOPE) has advocated transformation and development of “smart villages” across the country to improve standard of living in the rural areas and boost the rural economy. Development of rural India holds the key to the nation’s sustainable economic growth, it said. SCOPE Director-General U.D. Choubey told The Hindu...

-FirstPost.com Travelling across the country for the past five months to bring farmers’ voices to urban audiences through a programme called ‘Smart Agriculture’ - to be broadcast every Saturday and Sunday from 25 July on CNN-IBN - we have learnt that agriculture is not a low-profit activity. In fact, it returns more than double the amount of cash invested. Sandipan Suman, a 47 year-old agricultural sciences graduate and maize grower in Bihar’s...

-Tehelka Shamefully, in India, a large percentage of the population still defecates in the open. However, a village in Tamil Nadu has scripted a rare success story by becoming an Open Defecation-Free Village. Nisha Ponthathil documents how the people of Amarambedu near Chennai triumphed over habit with a little help from the civil society Twenty-nine-year-old R Karthick, a resident of Amarambedu village, situated about 65 kilometres away from Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today used his monthly radio broadcast to reach out to farmers and defend the controversial land acquisition bill, asking them not to be misled by the Opposition's "lies". He denied that his government's intended amendments to the UPA-steered 2013 land law favoured corporate houses and would deprive farmers even of the right to move court against a takeover of their land. Modi's speech launched the...

-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: Growing unemployment has come to haunt the Naveen Patnaik government with the number of jobless persons in the state crossing the 10lakh figure. Official statistics show that more than 10.86 lakh jobless persons had registered with the 80 state-run employment exchanges in 2013. Of these, 8,034 were technical graduates, including 6,093 engineering graduates and 303 technical postgraduates. The figure reveals the plight of the state's educated youth as 1.7 crore...