-The Hindu Business Line   The future of indigenous cattle lies in creating incentives to rear them India's indigenous cattle population has fallen by 8.9 per cent between 2007 and 2012 even as the numbers of exotic/crossbred cows and female buffaloes have gone up by 28.8 and 8 per cent respectively, according to the Agriculture Ministry's latest Livestock Census. Disturbing though this may seem to some, the trend is a reflection of rational...

-LSE Asia Research Centre Background: Farmers' suicides have become an important socio-economic concern in India that has profound implication on the quality of life of farmers and their families. There are not many epidemiological studies on this. We propose to estimate suicide rates for farmers and non-farmers across the states of India and over time. We will also contextualise our results to the discourse on agricultural technology and development in general...

-The Hindu Providing access to credit likely to be a hard step For Prime Minister Narendra Modi's newly launched Jan Dhan Yojana to be successful, India needs to provide over 100 million households access to banks, data show. An even harder step, however, is likely to be access to credit. As of March 2012, the most recent year for which relevant Reserve Bank of India (RBI) statistics are available, India had over 900...

-DNA The aim is to drive farmers out of agriculture and turn food production into industrial enterprise Some years ago, former President APJ Abdul Kalam was addressing students at an annual event organised by K Govindacharya's Bhartiya Swabhiman Andolan at Gulbarga in Karnataka. He exhorted students to work hard, educate themselves to become doctors, engineers, civil servants, scientists, economists and entrepreneurs. After he had ended his talk, a young student got...

-IPS News MALKANGIRI (Odisha)- Scattered across 31 remote hilltop villages on a mountain range that towers 1,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level, in the Malkangiri district of India's eastern Odisha state, the Upper Bonda people are considered one of this country's most ancient tribes, having barely altered their lifestyle in over a thousand years. Resistant to contact with the outside world and fiercely skeptical of modern development, this community of under...