-The Hindu Business Line Instructional videos made by, and for the agricultural community Treatment of paddy seeds and scientific application of fungicide in Odisha, the creation of an ‘Azolla’ mother pit in Andhra Pradesh, insights into mint cultivation in Uttar Pradesh, and natural remedies for diarrhoea in cattle in Karnataka. You learn about all these and more from the nearly 4,000 videos produced by Digital Green, a seven-year-old development venture that is...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The rapid warming in the Indian Ocean is weakening the monsoon, particularly over central India where agriculture is still mostly rain-fed, a study by meteorologists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology shows. The weakening trend in summer rainfall during 1901-2012 was also observed over the centraleast and northern regions of India, along the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basins and the Himalayan foothills. This will include states of Uttar Pradesh,...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-The Hindu The child’s ‘right to be heard’ has been validated by a UN Convention. It’s time to let children decide when and what kind of labour is right. The debate over children working has been raging for centuries, with policies constantly changing to reflect the attitudes of a given time. During the World Wars, children were allowed to work as they were needed in factories and other services. When the soldiers...

-The Financial Express The NITI Aayog must firm up a concrete plan involving the states to deal with monsoon deficiency to avoid all-round confusion. This is an old and oft-repeated story in the media, but worth mentioning here for the readers who have missed it. It goes like this. During the period of erstwhile Planning Commission, one of the officials in-charge of projecting agricultural growth found out an innovative way to do...