Basagonda adopted INM system to cultivate papaya Around three years ago when Basagonda Muttappanavar decided to join his father in farming, he had a dream: to bring about a radical change in farming methods. Confident Being the son of a farmer, the 27-year-old agriculture graduate was confident of turning the not-so-profitable land into a dividend-rich farm. Basagonda decided to cultivate Taiwan-786 variety of papaya on 4 acres of their 45-acre farm at Managuli village,...

-Live Mint To maintain his constant stream of RTI petitions, Agrawal says he gets ideas from day-to-day observations, news reports, government insiders, whistle-blowers and journalists. In the summer of 1985, a cloth merchant in Chandni Chowk, the crowded market in the old quarters of Delhi, received a call in response to a letter he had written to the papers asking why his favourite weekly television serial, Rajani, could not be aired daily...

In a bid to meet burgeoning housing requirements in cities and towns, the Union housing ministry is expected to set up a high-level committee to recommend policy interventions to facilitate creation of rental housing stocks to cater to those who cannot afford to buy houses.  Now, the housing shortage stands at around 27 million units, and estimates suggest that at least 50% is ascribed to people who cannot afford to own...

Science and technology hold the key to developing low-input, high-output agriculture. The challenge is to use new technologies creatively and to make evidence-based decisions on the deployment of new technologies. Crop breeding is carried out to meet two broad objectives: one, to increase yields of a crop per se and, two, to protect the yield potential by developing crops resistant to diseases, pests and environmental extremes.  Both yield-enhancement and yield-stabilisation are...

India Inc. was aghast at the recent report of a parliamentary committee that recommended that a new draft land acquisition law limit occasions when the government may intervene to acquire land for use by private firms. But in a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly last month, Delhi University economics professor Ram Singh laid out data that supports the committee’s recommendations. Mr. Singh argues that government-driven land acquisition is generally...