-Economic and Political Weekly   The stage is all set for the resumption of iron ore mining in Goa after it was suspended in the state in 2012, to curb its indiscriminate and illegal mining. The Goa government's decision to renew the mining leases comes at a time when the economics of iron ore mining have changed and environmental concerns have gained more prominence. Pamela D'Mello (dmello.pamela@gmail.com) is a Goa-based journalist. The state government...

-The Hindu Business Line Though migration of labour from the east has helped revive the plantations in southern India, questions remain on the long-term implications, Vishwanath Kulkarni reports As the harvest season starts in Coorg, Karnataka, coffee planter MC Kariappa has a lot of issues to contend with - productivity, weather and, the biggest worry of all in recent times, paucity of labourers. So when a dozen labourers from Assam landed at...

-Oxfam Blog Vanita Suneja, Oxfam India's Economic Justice Lead, argues that India can't progress until it tackles rural poverty. This entry was posted on 3 February 2015. More than 800 million of India's 1.25 billion people live in the countryside. One quarter of rural India's population is below the official poverty line - 216 million people. A search for economic justice for a population of this magnitude is never going to be...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Vegetables are the noble folk of food world, loved equally by doctors and grandmothers. Vegetarians live off them and meat-eaters are told to live off them. But in Delhi, under every crunchy leaf of radish or the shiny brinjal hide dangerous amounts of pesticides that can slowly kill, shows a new study by JNU. Pritha Chatterjee and Aniruddha Ghosal report how growers, consumers and the authorities may...

-Down to Earth It provides farmers with services to improve productivity and find better prices A non-profit based in Telangana, working on agricultural research and development, has launched a low-cost phone cum tablet computer-phablet-to benefit small holder farmers. "GreenPHABLET will allow information to be precisely targeted to individual smallholder farmers, helping them to purchase inputs at a lower price and get a better price for their produce. It will also link them to...