-The Telegraph New Delhi: A home ministry helpline offering information on quake-hit Nepal has been swamped by Indian farmers airing their distress, embarrassing a government already under the Opposition's cosh for its "anti-farmer" policies. Compounding the discomfiture, most of the callers are demanding the Rs 15 lakh that Narendra Modi had, during last year's election campaign, promised to deposit in every bank account after retrieving black money from abroad, ministry officials said. "We...

-The Times of India Marriage at a later age than in the past is a reality, but teenage brides are by no means as uncommon as we might think, with 41.3% of all girls aged 19 in India having married, according to just-released data from the 2011 census. Of over 10 million girls of this age at the time of the census, more than 4.1 million were married or already divorced,...

-The Economic Times BENGALURU: To fend off an agrarian crisis similar to the one sweeping across parts of North India and prevent farmer suicides, Karnataka has begun to implement a scheme to monsoon-proof the farmer that could turn out to be a national solution. About 35,000 farmers across the state's 175 taluks are implementing the pilot programme by setting up polythene-lined water storage ponds in their fields to prevent water seep age...

-Business Standard A clear picture is likely to emerge only towards the end of June Mumbai: Rural distress owing to heavy unseasonal rains in March and the prospects of less-than-normal monsoon have made bankers “a cautious lot” at the start of this financial year. However, it is too early to conclude that the impact of rains, or the lack of it, would be bad. According to public sector bank executives, the assessment for...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes. The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while...