-The Hindu Three out of five farmers in India grow their crops using rainwater, instead of irrigation. However, per hectare government investment into their lands may be 20 times lower, government procurement of their crops is a fraction of major irrigated land crops, and many of the government’s flagship agriculture schemes are not tailored to benefit them. A new rainfed agriculture atlas released this week not only maps the agro biodiversity and...

-Scroll.in Two labourers died of suspected pesticide poisoning in Kuttanad, the state’s rice bowl, in January. On the morning of January 17, KK Sanal Kumar strapped a motorised sprayer onto his back and left for a paddy field near his home in Peringara gram panchayat of Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district. The owners of the field, Unnikrishnan and Sanil, gave him several bottles of the highly hazardous pesticide Viraat to spray on their 40-day-old...

-Frontline.in Interview with R.B. Barman, former Chairperson, National Statistical Commission. R.B. Barman, former Chairperson of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), was member of the Indian Statistical Service before joining the Reserve Bank of India in 1979. He was president of the Indian Econometric Society in 2006-07, Vice Chairman, Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics, Bank for International Settlement, Basel, Switzerland, and Member, International Data Forum. He sent a paper to Prime...

-Business Standard Congress president's letters to chief ministers of Chhattisgarh, MP and Rajasthan asks them to 'review the implementation' of the Land Acquisition Act. Congress president Rahul Gandhi has asked the party’s chief ministers in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to undo changes that previous BJP governments made to the land acquisition law and related regulations. Gandhi has written letters asking the chief ministers to ensure that the rights of tribals and forest-dwellers...

-Frontline.in Available evidence indicates that the employment situation in India may have worsened in the recent past, and the losses have been heavy for the informal sector. The delayed release of official data on employment only makes diagnosis difficult. This year’s Union Budget, even if truncated because of its interim nature, was widely anticipated for the manner in which it would address the question of employment. In the last week of January,...