-Hindustan Times When Prime Minister Narendra Modi met some prominent billionaires last month, seeking quicker job-creation and investments, many industrialists complained that falling rural demand for goods was rocking their boats too. Incomes of India’s 833 million mostly poor rural population – a huge market for all kinds of goods – are barely rising and it is a cause for worry. Farming contributes just 15% of India’s $2 trillion economy, but half...

-Hindustan Times In August this year, whiteflies -- a notorious pest -- bumbled through vast tracts of Punjab’s cotton fields, destroying a sizeable chunk of the crop in the state. These insects, which slurp on juicy, tender bolls, seemed to have inflicted heavy losses, sparking a serious farm crisis in India’s agricultural powerhouse in a decade. A back-to-back drought meant farmers grew more cotton, a hardy crop that requires less water to...

Recently meat sale and consumption was banned in five BJP-ruled states of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana and Gujarat on the pretext of not hurting the religious sentiments of Jain community during Paryushan festival. Earlier this year, beef consumption and sale was banned in Maharashtra with the passage of Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 1995. A few days back, a Muslim man named Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched by a Hindu mob...

-Hindustan Times Hyderabad: In this year’s Telugu hit Srimanthudu, actor Mahesh Babu plays the sole heir of a multi-crore business empire who goes in search of his roots to the backwoods of Andhra Pradesh and adopts a run-down village to turn around its fortunes. The film that won critical acclaim and box office success was also praised by chief minister Chandrababu Naidu at a time when the state government has launched an...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Hundreds of schools in Delhi may be working out of unsafe buildings, endangering the lives of their students, since a structural stability certificate — needed for these institutions to remain functional — comes for as little as Rs 3,000, no questions asked. On hearing that engineers and architects at Tis Hazari court complex were “selling” these certificates, HT decided to test the theory — and found it to...