-The Tribune In India, mounting demographic pressures are leading to soil degradation. About 17 per cent of the global human and 11 per cent of livestock population is being sustained on a mere 2 per cent of the world's land and 4 per cent of its freshwater resources. The year 2015 has been designated as the International Year of the Soils by the United Nations. Recently, December 5 was commemorated as World...

-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's paddy farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than paddy itself. "We used to sell paddy at...

-TheHansIndia.com Mulai Payeng, a 57 year old tribal farmer from the Kathino bari village in the Jorhat district in upper Assam expresses surprise when asked if the lack of irrigation facilities or the changes in the rainfall pattern is affecting his cultivation. Payeng belongs to the Mishing community. According to state government data, presently over fifty percent of the irrigation projects are non functional in the state, and besides this environmentalists have pointed...

-Down to Earth The programme does not address challenges that farmers face in eastern states Farmers in Jharkhand have not derived significant benefits from the new Green Revolution programme initiated by the Centre in 2010-11, according to a report by non-profits working with the farmers in the state. The report claims that the government tried to implement the 1960s model of Green Revolution that increased agricultural production in Punjab and Haryana, without...

-PTI Indore: A group of tribal farmers in a remote hilly area of Madhya Pradesh's Barwani district continue to use a century-old irrigation method instead of modern motor pumps, enabling them to grow crops throughout the year. By following the technique, popularly called 'Paat' among tribals, 13 farmers in the hilly Aavli village of the district are able to irrigate their fields, spread on 125 acres of land, from far off water...