-The Hindu   Agriculture activities come to a standstill in Gulbarga Karnataka: It has been an agonising wait for farmers in Gulbarga district. After a gap of several years, the district faces the bleak prospect of losing the chance to take up sowing of green and black grams, soyabean and sesame this year because of inordinate delay in the onset of the monsoon. As per the details available with the Agriculture Department on Monday,...

-The Hindu   A welter of problems may be in store for the country These are testing times for the Narendra Modi government in the farm and food sector: the south-west (June-September) monsoon is delayed, deficient and weak; kharif sowing, much of which is rain-fed, is lagging by over 17 per cent over last year; rising food prices are pushing up inflation and pulling down growth. Right now the prices of only perishable...

-The Hindu   Salt workers toil under inhuman conditions to create the ingredient that converts a tasteless lump of calories into consumable tasty food Salt has played an iconic role in our freedom struggle, symbolised by the great salt satyagraha of 1933, led by Mahatma Gandhi at Dandi. Every child in India knows about this but how many know that a similar satyagraha was led in the Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu) by...

-The Hindu   ‘What is the basis for raising dam height?' Even as the official-level Narmada Control Authority (NCA) asserted that all project-affected families facing displacement at the present height of the Narmada dam had been "resettled," several people still living in the submergence villages arrived here on Tuesday from Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat seeking a hearing from the Central government. The oustees, many of who are struggling for the last 29 years,...

-The Business Standard   The government needs counter cyclical policies to tackle vegflation, which has become a recurrent problem Somebody help. Narendra Modi and Arun Jaitley are held hostage, not by jihadists, recalcitrant opposition, international capital or the ever-erratic monsoon, but by faceless, nameless manipulators of Nasik, Navi Mumbai and Azadpur markets. The "raw" terror they have let loose resounds in the corridors of government as well as media power. Cutting to the chase,...