-Hindustan Times Madhya Pradesh’s Babulal Dahiya is a collector of folk songs and seeds and has sown 110 varieties of rice to preserve them. Bhopal: He is a collector of folk songs and seeds. And it was while collecting Bagheli folklore, this 72-year-old farmer cum Bagheli poet realized that saving folk songs and sayings won’t mean much if the local crop varieties, which repeatedly crop up in the folk literature, are...

-The Financial Express In Madhya Pradesh’s tribal districts of Dewas and Khargone, the NGO, Samaj Pragati Sahayog, discourages cash transactions for agricultural inputs. The interest rates are usurious and vary according to commodities. For fertiliser, it is dheda—loan for the stuff has to be repaid 1.5 times over by the end of the harvest season. For pesticides it is sawa, or 1.25 times. Even barter can be extortionate. One quintal of...

-Livemint.com The inclusion of digital tools in the lives of NGOs will not only make them a mass producer of digital content, but will also help make the voices of civil society louder Amid all the negativity about the roles and responsibilities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mostly from the government and in many cases the business sector, one fact that nobody can take away from the non-profits is that theirs is...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-Economic and Political Weekly Unlimited growth for prosperity in a fi nite planet is not possible. Ecological economists like Tim Jackson, Peter Victor, and others talk about prosperity without growth and highlight the need for greening the economy on a community scale. Using the "criteria of green economy enterprise" set by Jackson and Victor as a tool, this article looks at khadi production, India's community-level cloth production system. Sumanas Koulagi (k.sumanas@yahoo.in) is...