-Livemint.com Farm politics became defunct due to sustained increases in crop prices In a year of crisis for Indian agriculture all kinds of solutions have been proposed. Stock answers range from farm loan waivers to halting amendments to the law on land acquisition. Leaders such as Rahul Gandhi have even taken to well-publicized padyatras. There is something of a Who Killed Cock Robin quality to all this. What no one is...

-The Indian Express While tractor sales trebled during FY04-14, the last year saw a reversal in the trend with the agri industry facing multiple issues. If there is one indicator capturing the changes that took place in rural India over the past decade, along with the emerging signs of distress in the last year, it is the sales of tractors. Between 2003-04 and 2013-14, domestic tractor sales more than trebled from under...

-ANI Greening the barren land in Jharkhand and West Bengal Deoghar: Standing amid the road in Kasuadi village in Jharkhand, Deevani Mahato looks intently towards the contrasting landscape stretching across on both sides of the road. Wet green fields of wheat, mustard and grams, separated by the bunds of mud, cover the land on one side. Barren tracts of red soil full of dry bushes and stones stretch on the other. "By next...

-FirstPost.com Former Central Information Commissioner (CIC) Shailesh Gandhi on Monday lashed out at the Centre for allegedly rendering the Right to Information (RTI) Act "dysfunctional" by taking retrogressive steps. In an open letter written to a section of the media, Gandhi said, "the present Prime Minister has taken preemptive action by not appointing a Chief Information Commissioner at all to render it dysfunctional." Gandhi, a noted RTI activist from Mumbai, was appointed to...

-India Today Ahmedabad: IIT-Madras graduate Kannan Lakshminarayan dusted a few copies of "Young India" to find Mahatma Gandhi's vision and initiate cotton farmers to use miniature spinning machines right in their village where they grow the crop and increase their income. Following this, the middleman was out, the long-drawn value chain was short-circuited while farmers became spinners first and subsequently, weavers and even garment makers. In 1920, Mahatma Gandhi had written in...