-The Financial Express Though food inflation could be lower than last year's 11.1%, fruit and vegetable prices remain the pressure points. Concerns over monsoon have diminished a lot in recent weeks because of four positive developments. First, rainfall deficiency has reduced sharply from a century-high of 45% for June to 17% as on August 18. Second, sowing has caught up significantly from 40% below normal in mid-July to just 2.3% below normal...

-IPS News MALKANGIRI (Odisha)- Scattered across 31 remote hilltop villages on a mountain range that towers 1,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level, in the Malkangiri district of India's eastern Odisha state, the Upper Bonda people are considered one of this country's most ancient tribes, having barely altered their lifestyle in over a thousand years. Resistant to contact with the outside world and fiercely skeptical of modern development, this community of under...

-The Economic Times None of the standard explanations quite explain the rise in food prices India has seen: pronounced since 2006 and alarming after 2010. Drought and poor rains? The country has seen good aggregate rainfall in most of those years. Spike in global prices? Those were high in 2007-08, not now. Fragmented value chains that allow middlemen to grab large margins? The value chain has always been fragmented. Growth has slowed...

-The Asian Age Three common arguments are advanced to the citizens of India as justifying the need for genetically modified crops. None of these owe their intellectual genesis to the present NDA government (which is employing them nonetheless), and can be found as theses in both UPA2 and UPA1. They are: Genetically engineered seed and crop are necessary in order that India find lasting food security; that good science and particularly...

-The Times of India In a sternly-worded letter dashed off to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Andhra Pradesh government has urged the institution to not underestimate the distressful conditions prevailing in the state for the past three years, which has forced as many as 6,792 farmers to commit suicide. The nine-page letter dated July 25, countering RBI's argument about AP reporting no cases of acute concern among farmers, has been...