-The Hindu With crops hit by drought and the TO-1057 seed, our reporter visits Narayangaon, among the country’s largest Tomato growing regions, and finds farmers struggling to cope with the failed harvest but still faithful to the fruit Last week, the grey rain clouds over the Sahyadris seemed full of promise. A few light showers, and colour was slowly returning to parched leaves and the dry earth was beginning to yield again....

-Scroll.in Farmers in Maharashtra say almost all the seeds supplied by one company contracted a disease. A failure of Tomato seeds might have contributed to the current rise in Tomato prices across Maharashtra, if not the rest of the country. Since April, Tomato prices have more than doubled across India. While the conventional wisdom has attributed this to excessive heat and unseasonal rain that affected the Tomato crop at its flowering stage, farmers...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Government scientists have called for nationwide surveillance to look for a caterpillar native to South America that has slipped into at least four Indian states and could threaten the country's Tomato growers and the ketchup-and-puree industries. The scientists at the National Bureau of Agricultural Insect Resources (NBAIR), Bangalore, worried about the pest's spread, have also initiated efforts to get wasps and predatory bugs to serve as its natural...

-The Times of India Sometimes it's pricey onions driving consumers to tears, at other times, potatoes or pulses. But this summer is different. A triple whammy of scorching Tomato and potato prices, alongside pulses — arhar and urad — has wrecked family budgets. In the last two years, arhar prices have doubled while those of urad have increased by around 120%. Even gram (chana dal), which is produced in large quantities and...

-The Hindu Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, on Wednesday, held an inter-ministerial meeting to discuss the spiralling prices of food and carve out a strategy to cool inflation. Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu attended the meeting. Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian was also present. During the meeting, discussions were held to devise ways to meet the gap between demand...