-The Telegraph   Bottle gourd shells, used to make traditional musical instruments like sitar and tanpura, are no longer grown by the farmers in Howrah, reports Amrita Ghosh West Bengal: Its not without reason that "shader lau..." is the most popular folk song in parts of rural Bengal, including Howrah. "Lau" or bottle gourd, as the folk song goes, turns a man into a vagrant as he eats its base and its top...

-The World Bank   STORY HIGHLIGHTS In the early 2000s, it was found that the causes of stagnant infant and maternal mortality rates in Tamil Nadu identified the lack of reliable, low cost, and accessible emergency transportation In September 2008, the Government of Tamil Nadu in partnership with GVK Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI) launched the free 108 emergency transportation service in the state. ...

-Society for Labour and Development The key findings of the report entitled Exploring Rural-Urban Dynamics- A Study of Inter-State Migrants in Gurgaon: Researching Labour and Migration between Home and Destination States and Developing a Holistic Rural-Urban Approach (2014) is provided below: 1. Overwhelming majority of the inter-state migrants in Gurgaon are men in the age group of 18 to 40 years. While garment industry elsewhere has majority of female workers, Gurgaon's export-oriented...

-Tehelka If a house can be insured against natural disaster, why can't a crop field? There is nothing more gruesome for any farmer than to see before his own eyes his lush green standing crop flattened by the vagaries of nature. All his hopes and aspirations from a bountiful harvest are grounded in a matter of few minutes. Not only the crop, but his life too is flattened. As many as 24...

-The Guardian Rice conservationist Debal Deb grapples with 'mindless Indian elite' to reintroduce genetically diverse, drought-tolerant varieties   Fifty years ago, every Indian village would probably have grown a dozen or more rice varieties that grew nowhere else. Passed down from generation to generation and family to family, there would have been a local variety for every soil and taste - rice that would grow well in droughts or deep floods, which had...