-The Times of India BATHINDA: Finding it difficult to repay his loan and facing damage to his cotton crop, a young farmer committed suicide on Thursday at a farmers' protest venue in Bathinda. Kuldeep Singh, 26, of Chughe Kalan village in Bathinda consumed a poisonous substance around 2am and died four hours later at a hospital. Kuldeep's family owns five acres of land and had taken another 13 acres on lease. He had...

-Hindustan Times Bhubaneswar: A 13-year-old girl from Odisha’s backward Koraput district bagged a prestigious $10,000 award at the finals of the Google Science Fair in the United States late on Tuesday for her low-cost water purifier using corn cobs. Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai will be supported in her research for one year by the well-known journal, Scientific American, for winning the Community Impact Award that honours projects which make a practical difference...

-The Hindu Business Line Recently, the Telangana Agricultural Advisory Forum, consisting of a few university professors and scientists, deliberated on the causes and consequences of the drought and farmer ‘suicides’ in the State. The unofficial number of suicides attributed to farm families is 1,152. An inquiry into some of the recent suicides reveals an interesting picture. The farmers were not indebted to cooperative credit societies or commercial banks. The case of a...

-The Indian Express In 2006, the Rural Development Ministry under then minister Jairam Ramesh had inked an agreement for the publication of an annual India Rural Development Report by the IDFC Rural Development Network. An overwhelming majority of rural, landowning households in the country are Hindus — with their number growing between 2004-05 and 2011-12 — while Muslims constitute only a small minority, a new government-endorsed study has found. According to the...

-Deccan Herald Twenty years, 35 villages and over 10 lakh surviving trees. Harshavardhan Sheelavant narrates a community initiative in Dharwad district that has converted hundreds of acres of fallow land into green orchards and transformed the lives of farmers. It was another monsoon day without rains. But the dry spell didn’t quench the spirit of residents of Belligatti village in Dharwad district who assembled near a small hillock on the outskirts of...