A recently released report shows that only a few enterprises belonging to the labour-intensive Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector could take advantage of the 205 number of public schemes (available in October 2015) of various Ministries or Departments of the Government, as listed at the website www.clusterobservatory.in.   (Please click here to access the report on MSMEs and the challenges they face). Prepared by the Foundation for MSME Clusters...

-Livemint.com No matter which party is ruling, onion farmers will always be the victims of a biased state policy Onion prices have plummeted and onion producers in Maharashtra are in distress. Union minister Nitin Gadkari has appealed to them to diversify their production to avoid a repeat of the situation. Such appeals are unfair. For one, the minister was silent when his government brought down onion prices by restricting exports, and two, thanks...

-TheWire.in Swayam Shikshan Prayog, a Maharashtra-based non-profit, is helping women become clean energy pioneers, in an initiative that has earned them a UN climate award. Varsha Pawar of Osmanabad district in Maharashtra was like any other housewife till she started selling solar cook stoves and lamps in her neighbourhood a little over a year ago. Life was never the same again. Today, she is the sarpanch (village council chief) of Tirth Khurd,...

-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...

-Hindustan Times India is growing more food but also wasting up to 67 million tonne of it every year, a government study shows. That’s more than the national output of countries such as Britain. And enough food for Bihar, one of India’s larger states, for a whole year. The value of the food lost – Rs 92,000 crore -- is nearly two-thirds of what it costs the government to feed 600 million...