-The Economic Times ARIYALUR: Everyone else may love a good drought, but not the victims who stare at a dim future. As serious drought looms large over South India, farmers live in distress and despair fearing a steep drop in acre age and yields. There may have been a few temporary measures by governments to compensate the dam ages, but that may be too little too late. ET's team of reporters walked...

-Livemint.com The government’s model law for agricultural reforms aims to allow farmers a wider choice of markets beyond the local mandi New Delhi: The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is working on creating a common agricultural market that will improve the lot of farmers and the efficiencies of India’s notoriously inefficient farm-produce markets. The government put out a model law proposing a fundamental reset in the way agricultural markets operate on 24 April....

-The Indian Express An expert panel set up by the green tribunal has said it would take 10 years and Rs 42 crore to revive the Yamuna floodplains, after the damage caused by the World Culture Festival. It was a mela Parvati never saw. The curtains had come up wherever she looked, even around the strip of land where her cows usually graze. “Bandhook leke seedhe khade hue the,” she said about...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-The Indian Express A good, even if not record, wheat crop along with improved prices brings cheer after two not-so-good years. Dewas (Madhya Pradesh): Manohar Singh Sendhav cannot offhand recall the number of trips he has made to the Dewas mandi or to the shining steel silo at Durgapur, some 10 km away. Undaunted by the searing noon heat, this farmer from Chandakhedi village in Dewas district’s Sonkatch taluka watches his tractor driver...