-Deccan Chronicle Chennai: "With an estimated 8 billion mouths to feed by 2025, achieving zero hunger by that deadline is indeed challenging and this calls for arriving at precise solutions, particularly in ensuring access to nutritious food, not calories alone," said Dr M.S. Swaminathan, founder chairman of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai. "Family farming offers an effective and economic solution to help meet the challenge of making sure that...

-The Indian Express For the first time, the interests of farmers, livelihood losers and SC/ST communities have been given high priority. After intensive and extensive consultations lasting for over two years, the UPA 2 government succeeded in getting Parliament to pass a historic new land acquisition law in September 2013. This law completely replaced the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894. The new legislation did not fully satisfy everybody but it came to...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-Down to Earth Five out of 20 world's most water-stressed cities are in India, says study Months after being named the city with world's most polluted air, here comes another blow for Delhi. A study, carried out by non-profit The Nature Conservancy, says that India's capital city is world's second most water-stressed city, just behind Tokyo. The study was carried out after surveying the water infrastructure of world's 500 cities with population of...