-The Times of India KUSHINAGAR, UP: The two sons of Sonwa Devi were very ill and hungry for days until they died, almost together, on September 14, unaware of the fact that the government, far away from their wretched lives in the eastern UP district, had celebrated September as National Nutrition Month to mark India’s fight against malnutrition. A few kilometres away, in Rakba Dulma Patti village, Virendra Musahar and his family...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-The Hindu Bhuira's women are coping with the higher workload by creating vastly more flexible family and community structures. And they are simultaneously pushing towards modernity much faster than their neighbours. Everyone in the village sneaks a glance when Upasana Kumari drives her White Maruti 800 to work. “Driving a car is intoxicating,” says Kumari. A winding, muddy, single lane road that starts from the edge of the hillock where Kumari’s house...

-The Indian Express Getting the right remuneration is the most critical issue facing farmers. Government must provide policy, institutional framework for procurement. The farmer and his income is an important theme of discussion these days. A lot is being written on ways to increasing, and doubling, the farmers’ incomes by the year 2022. Viewed arithmetically, the income of a farmer is a function of three things — the cost of cultivation, production...

-The Times of India In the next few days, India’s northern region, especially Delhi, is again likely to become among the most polluted places on earth because a vast number of farmers in Punjab and Haryana have decided to continue their annual ritual of setting fire to paddy straw. This has brought back the spectre of smog choking the region despite the Centre doling out more than Rs 1,000 crore to the...