-The Hindu Business Line The risk of water availability is a painful reality in south Asian agriculture including India. Any deviation from the monsoon causes problems for the farm community and poses threat to food security in the region. The variability in precipitation in India has actually increased in recent years. While comparing the variability of precipitation (given by standard deviation) between two phases, 1950-75 and 1976-2010, in two geographically dispersed districts...

-The Indian Express Food inflation owes largely to agricultural markets being regulated by outdated laws. The RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, has a difficult task this week. He has to decide whether to keep interest rates constant or raise them - bearing in mind the possible taper of the US Fed's bond buying programme, a decline in industrial production and a rise in inflation. The sharp increase in consumer price-based inflation, to more...

-The Indian Express In Gujarat, growth relies on indebtedness. And relegates development. The Gujarat pattern of development has often been arraigned from the left because of its social deficits. Indeed, the state's social indicators do not match its economic performance. With 23 per cent of its citizens living below the poverty line in 2010, Gujarat does better than the Indian average - 29.8 per cent - but it reduced this proportion by...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A scientific panel has identified flaws in India's existing regulatory system that governs genetically modified (GM) crops and called for an indefinite moratorium on trials of GM food crops until the regulatory system is fixed. The regulatory system, which the Indian government has used to process dossiers of several GM crops, has "major gaps" and will require "rethinking, investment, and relearning to fix," a technical expert committee (TEC)...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After seeing the massive rescue operation to its completion, the Uttarakhand government, with the aid of disaster management authorities, is getting ready to release the final list of "missing" persons who can, for all practical purposes, be "presumed dead". The "missing" database is expected to be ready by the weekend, or July 8, and will be released soon after. Sources overseeing the relief work indicated that...