-The Hindu SRIKAKULAM: Mushroom cultivation is helping many unemployed youth and tribal farmers to get decent livelihood with less investment in Srikakulam district. Women groups have joined them in learning cultivation techniques thanks to huge demand for mushrooms in Visakhapatnam, Srikakulam and Vizianagaram districts. National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) has been conducting a series of training programmes with the support of various non governmental organisations including BREDS and ARTS...

-The Hindu Gajendra Singh Rajput from Dausa. Hargovind Harane from Vidarbha . Gosai Patra from Bardhaman. Why did these farmers take their own lives? In the light of the burning issue of farmer suicides across the country, A.R. Vasavi looks at the plight of the marginalised cultivator. Basamma and her ailing husband have carried and spread their five sacks of ragi (finger millet) from their half-acre plot to the local tar road...

-IPS News NAYAGARH (IPS): Kama Pradhan, a 35-year-old tribal woman, her eyes intent on the glowing screen of a hand-held GPS device, moves quickly between the trees. Ahead of her, a group of men hastens to clear away the brambles from stone pillars that stand at scattered intervals throughout this dense forest in the Nayagarh district of India’s eastern Odisha state. The heavy stone markers, laid down by the British 150 years...

-Tehelka Agrarian policies are proving to be an albatross around the neck of ordinary farmers Amon Singh Kevat, 70, a small farmer in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, spent three long days in April waiting for his harvest to be picked up from an open plot that served as a mandi (procurement centre for agricultural produce). In need of money for a marriage in the family, Kevat didn’t even go home for meals. But...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes. The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while...