-The Telegraph Ranchi: Ranchi residents, who discovered in 2013 that Rs 500 equalled to not even a week's worth of vegetables, will welcome this piece of news. Year-round vegetable farming is a better catch than slippery fish, say Ramdaga villagers in Angara block, near Getalsud dam, 25km off the capital. Ramdaga villagers normally raised one paltry crop a year, fished at the Getalsud dam and came to Ranchi to work as manual...

-CNN-IBN   Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala): A man in Thiruvananthapuram is on a mission to clean up the Chengottukonam pond in which has become the 'favourite' spot for many to dump waste material. Justin Raj begins each day spending an hour on the banks of the pond inspecting the water. He has to watch out daily for fungus that can harm the fish in it. Justin began the exercise four years ago shelling out Rs...

-The Indian Express Agricultural GDP is underestimated due to inaccurate non-cereal data. It started with a mundane question: what is the chicken population in India? There are glaring inconsistencies in the available data. The National Sample Survey Organisation's (NSSO's) surveys show a 20 per cent annual growth of chicken consumption between 2005 and 2010. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the production of chicken meat only rose 10 per...

-The Hindu The chopping off of the palms of two migrant workers is a wake-up call The gruesome incident of the chopping off of the palms of two migrant labourers of Kalahandi district of western Odisha by the labour contractor mafia in December 2013 should serve as a wake-up call. The incident highlights the ruthless extent to which the mafia can go to meet its ends and brings home the fact that...

-Down to Earth A Kerala village grows organic pokkali rice after 25 years Harvest of pokkali rice in Kerala's Ezhupunna village, which began on October 27 and lasted three weeks, was nothing short of a local event. After all, the indigenous, saline and flood-resistant rice variety was cultivated in the village after 25 years. People in the village had to wage a long battle to be able to cultivate the crop once...