-Hindustan Times Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialise After a gap of three years, the Karnataka government has reintroduced ragi/finger millet in its public distribution system (PDS). To feed the PDS system, the government has announced a procurement price much higher than the market price and introduced bonuses. With interventions on the sides of both production as well as consumption, the objectives are...

-Hindustan Times In 3 years, the Agarwals have prevented the land from being damaged five times Mumbai: Refraining from the usual practice of blaming authorities for destruction of mangroves and wetlands in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, this Navi Mumbai couple felt obligated to make a change. For the last three years, Sunil Agarwal, 55, and his wife Shruti, 50, residents of NRI Complex in Nerul, Navi Mumbai, have been guarding an 80-hectare wetland...

-The Hindu District Collector in Kerala breathes new life into the Karimaramthodu Pathanamthitta (Kerala): A nearly dead natural stream in Kerala has been nursed back to life by a District Collector, who believes that “there is a stream flowing through everyone’s life.” No one imagined that Karimaramthodu, which at one time flowed vigorously around the paddy fields of Aranmula Puncha, could be salvaged after it was filled up for a private airport project. Their...

  The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has contended that the growth in real Gross Value Added (GVA) by the agrarian sector will not decline in 2017-18 vis-à-vis 2016-17 as has been predicted by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The first advance estimates of CSO show that the growth rate in GVA at basic price (at 2011-12 prices) of the 'Agriculture, forestry & fishing' sector is likely to dip from 4.9...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The National Human Rights Commission has called the Uttar Pradesh police "an organised gang of criminals", quoting a half-century-old Allahabad High Court observation, while hearing charges of wrongful detention, sexual assault, false implication and cover-up against the cops. "There is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crime comes anywhere near the record of that single organised unit which is known...