-The Hindu Sunita Devi couldn’t take her Class IX final exams because the date clashed with the day of her marriage. Nine years on, she has not completed her degree course, but teaches other Dalit women who couldn’t continue their studies after marriage. The resident of Baghpat in western Uttar Pradesh was recounting her story to a large number of Dalit women who gathered here on Tuesday as part of the first...

-Down to Earth An ecologist has been guarding seeds of more than 750 rare rice varieties for over a decade Lit by a kerosene lamp, the two-room hut just outside a sleepy hamlet in Odisha’s Rayagada district can easily pass off as any other farmer’s house in this tribal region. Step inside it, and one is taken aback by the hundreds of earthen pots labelled with coded stickers stacked in a corner...

-First Post Predictably, the recommendation by an experts’ panel appointed by the Supreme Court  - that trials of genetically modified (GM) crops should be halted for 10 years – has stirred a hornet’s nest. Such a moratorium would include ongoing trials and the court rejected it. This follows on the heels of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture’s 492-page report published in August which asked for the banning of GM food crops...

-The Hindustan Times Some time ago I visited a Dalit hamlet in Rewa district. It was hemmed in on all sides by the fields of upper-caste farmers, who refused to allow any approach road to reach the hamlet. There were short roads inside the hamlet, but they stopped abruptly at the edge of it. The hamlet felt like an island, surrounded by hostile territory. I wondered whether any other country still...

-The United Nations Temperatures this year are the ninth highest on record since 1850 despite the effect of La Niña, a meteorological phenomenon which is supposed to have a cooling influence on the Earth’s atmosphere, says a new United Nations report released today. High temperatures were accompanied by unprecedented melting of the Arctic sea ice and multiple weather and climate extremes which affected many parts of the world. The findings are among the...