-The Telegraph   Ranchi: Jharkhand has started to digitise its public distribution system (PDS) as a part of the National Informatics Centre's (NIC) pan-India initiative to monitor foodgrain theft, but for now only on a pilot basis across six blocks of as many districts. Part of the larger Rs 160-crore central project, Jharkhand is starting with distributing tablets and hand-held computers to 200 of the state's 22,500 PDS dealers in blocks of Ormanjhi...

-IANS   A bumper wheat crop this season should have brought smiles on the faces of Punjab's hard-working farmers. But a variety of adverse circumstances, including the weather, has left them dispirited. The bumper crop apart, Punjab farmers have been forced to deal with unseasonal rainfall and thunderstorms in recent days with the harvested crop lying in the open in grain markets and agricultural fields getting wet and moisture content in the grains...

-Women's Feature Service   For tribal communities, the forest has traditionally been their habitat, their source of income and their nutritional lifeline. So protection of the green cover and ready access to forest produce are issues that are connected with their survival. In India, while The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, recognises the rights of forest-dwellers over land and other resources, in reality there...

-The Hindu Funds from Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan are pumped into ‘schools' in Bastar that don't exist On the day the Chhattisgarh government issued a statement emphasising how the Prime Minister's adviser, T.K.A. Nair, praised the efforts to educate children, 32 students of Koynapada primary school in Darbha block in Bastar district did not attend school. In fact, they could not as the school does not exist. An official confirmed that the disappearance...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Fertilizer minister Srikant Jena may keep claiming that annually 30 lakh tonne of highly subsidized urea for agriculture is being smuggled to chemical factories, but the government says states have reported only 24 such cases since 2010-11. Jena had recently said at a conference of Indian Fertilizer Association (IFA) that there are serious signs of Mismanagement in an information technology-driven era when targeted farmers can be...