-Reuters   PERLE: As a shiny red harvester bounces across the black earth into the first row of sugar cane, excited schoolchildren run after it and several dozen men stand gaping in the wake of its swift progress. It's the first time that Perle, a village on the banks of the Krishna river in Maharashtra state, has seen a machine used for cutting the tough cane. "This machine will harvest my entire field today,"...

Natives of Niyamgiri feel that the police is acting as an agent of the Vedanta group, playing dirty tricks to help the company go ahead with its plans to mine bauxite from the sacred hills ONE OF the world’s most controversial mines is back in the spotlight after hundreds protested against renewed efforts to mine Odisha’s Niyamgiri Hills. Dongria Kondh and Niyamgiri supporters held their own ‘public hearing’ in Odisha...

A new report underlines the benefits of organic farming in the age of climate change While addressing a conference on the National Water Week this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh underlined the brewing water crisis. It could as well have been called the ‘National Water Weak’ — for this precious commodity for life is struggling to survive. The maximum blame for wastage of water is often put at the doors of...

People with agricultural land that they do not wish to cultivate will soon have the option of depositing it in government land banks that will offer them consistent monetary returns. With an incentive system broadly on the lines of a bank account, the public land bank will offer payments based on the tenure and size of the holding with additional benefits if the land is leased out. "A lot of land is...

Officials may pocket the wage increases, but the wage level in MGNREGA seems just enough to induce workers to turn up. This year marks the sixth anniversary of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India's landmark right-to-work programme. The Act guarantees 100 days of paid employment to every rural household in India (up to 850 million people), regardless of eligibility criteria, and establishes the government's...