-The Hindu Business Line They account for a third of the agricultural workforce, but don’t get the benefits and opportunities the menfolk enjoy India celebrated its first Women Farmer’s Day on October 15, but the word farmer or kisan is still seen as being synonymous with a male farm worker. This perception is built on two assumptions — first, farming is a masculine profession; and, second, when women are involved in farm...

-Livemint.com The production of ‘mahua’ is finally entering the formal economy as new initiatives seek to upscale this indigenous drink, selling it across the country and even the globe It is a cloudy morning in Nangur village in Bastar district, Chattisgarh. It is a settlement of a little over 400 families, considered fairly large in these parts. We make a bumpy journey down a narrow, unpaved road intermittently shaded by sargi (sal)...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The Centre, in an unprecedented move, has asked the Telangana government to return Rs 190 crore which was given to the state in 2016-17 for building rural houses for the poor under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). This comes after the K Chandrashekar Rao-ruled state has refused to update the Centre of its progress on implementing the scheme. A target of building 70,674 houses was allotted...

-Livemint.com With shrinking farm sizes and lack of accurate land records, farmers find it difficult to generate enough income to provide for their households From farm subsidies to farm loan waivers, the Indian government spends crores on farmer welfare, but these efforts will be inadequate unless they can tackle an increasingly daunting barrier: lack of land. The provisional figures from the latest agriculture census reveals how land—the most critical input for agriculture—is...

-TheWire.in In villages where the number of households as per the baseline survey is less than the actual households, the toilet building exercise poses an allocation challenge: Who gets the limited number of toilets? Barabanki/ Meerut/ Lucknow/ Shamli: Usha Devi is 24, belongs to a so-called lower caste. She has five children, the eldest is seven-years-old and the youngest one month. Her husband works as a labourer at a brick kiln...