-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party is inking its agriculture policy to connect with rural voters and expand its support base. Apart from farm production, the policy will focus on ensuring income security for farmers through a series of measures including a farmers' income commission, increasing access to insurance and credit facilities for tenant farmers and improving rural infrastructure. Recent data from the National Crime Records Bureau show...

-The Hindu Jardhar village comprises of nearly 26 small hamlets in Uttarakhand. Like hundreds of villages in the country agriculture is a major occupation here. But the village is known for more than just agriculture. It houses some of the country's best and ‘lost' ancient seed varieties. This is thanks to Mr. Vijay Jardhari, a small farmer and founder of seed saving movement called Beej Bachao Andolan (seed savers movement), who has managed...

-The Guardian Rice conservationist Debal Deb grapples with 'mindless Indian elite' to reintroduce genetically diverse, drought-tolerant varieties   Fifty years ago, every Indian village would probably have grown a dozen or more rice varieties that grew nowhere else. Passed down from generation to generation and family to family, there would have been a local variety for every soil and taste - rice that would grow well in droughts or deep floods, which had...

-The Hindu Jai Prakash Singh has won many awards for his work to preserve native seeds A Varanasi farmer, Jai Prakash Singh, is a proud recipient of three awards - two from former Presidents in 2002 and 2009, and the Plant Genome award from the government for his outstanding role in preserving hundreds of native seed varieties. The farmer has to his credit about 460 paddy, 120 wheat, 30 pulse and four mustard...

-The Hindu Sample size 5,000 households with 11,000 interviewees Price rise, not corruption, will be the most important issue for farmers when they go to vote in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, says a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) random survey. The sample size comprised 5,000 farming households with 11,000 interviewees including 4,298 women and 2,115 youths. Issues of unemployment and lack of irrigation will be other concerns that...