-The Economic Times "Open any boll here and you'll see it's destroyed," says Ganesh Shere, a farmer at a village called Jamb in Yavatmal district, about 160 km from Nagpur, in northeast Maharashtra. He walks along the length of his bone-dry, four-acre cotton field and splits two dozen cotton bolls, with a stone or his fingers, to reveal the damage done by pink bollworms, which have become resistant to the genetically modified...

-Hindustan Times The Rs 7,000-crore sector in Himalayan states reels under high temperature, low rainfall The drought-like situation prevailing in the northwest Himalayas may spell bad news for the Rs 7,000-crore apple economy that sustains people residing in the upper regions of Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir. This winter has been one of the warmest in the last decade, weather department officials said. Apple orchards usually need 500 to 1,000 chilling hours (with temperatures ranging...

-The Hindu For the 117 vacancies, 18,200 applications were received TIRUNELVELI (Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu): M.Phil. graduates, postgraduates, engineering graduates and others waited in a long queue in front of Tirunelveli District Central Cooperative Society as certificate verification and interview for 117 posts of salespersons in ration shops in the district began on Wednesday. Though the basic qualification for this post is just a pass in Plus Two, the educational qualification of the aspirants...

-The Hindu Many States have initiated ‘reforms’ of the public distribution system that are hurting millions of people India’s public distribution system (PDS) is in danger of being derailed in several States across the country. Recent disruptions of the PDS have taken different forms, from compulsory biometric authentication to so-called direct benefit transfer (DBT). The consequences are alarming, but tend to go unreported. Biometric mix-ups Jharkhand is a prime example of this problem. By...

-The Indian Express The dairies are blaming the current situation on the crash in international skimmed milk powder (SMP) prices Puntamba (Maharashtra): Since early September, Nitin Dhanvate’s dairy farm business has gone for a toss. Till around then, the 33-year-old from this village in Ahmednagar district’s Rahata taluka was receiving Rs 28 per litre for the milk containing 3.5 per cent fat and 8.5 per cent SNF (solids-not-fat) he was supplying to...