-Reuters   PERLE: As a shiny red harvester bounces across the black earth into the first row of sugar cane, excited schoolchildren run after it and several dozen men stand gaping in the wake of its swift progress. It's the first time that Perle, a village on the banks of the Krishna river in Maharashtra state, has seen a machine used for cutting the tough cane. "This machine will harvest my entire field today,"...

-DNA The state government’s proposal to let farmers circumvent the agriculture produce market committees and sell their yield directly to consumers — which essentially means whoever they wish to sell it to — needs to be welcomed even by those of us in the cities who may not be conversant with agricultural practices. While the middlemen who control the APMCs are bound to raise howls of protest about the attempt to overturn...

-PTI Milk prices in the national capital and adjoining areas will rise by up to Rs 2 per litre from Monday with two leading suppliers hiking rates, but largest seller Mother Dairy is not increasing rates just yet. Amul and Quality Dairy will increase milk prices from Monday. Mother Dairy and Paras are the other two major milk suppliers in the national capital and its adjoining areas which consume over 115 lakh...

-One World South Asia The World Bank signs an agreement with India to inject $ 352 million into the National Dairy Support Project, an initiative designed to revive the flagging fortunes of milk production in the country. Other than being crucial to the nutritional security of the country’s population; dairy farming or dairying is also a major source of livelihood for 147 million rural households in India. Spurred by the success of the...

HETA, India – At the entrance to this village in India’s eastern state of Jharkhand, a large pond glistened under the bright autumn sun. Yellow and blue lilies surrounded it. A tailor was stitching clothes outside his shop while a few boys nearby were playing carrom on the lid of a rusted oil barrel. It was a tranquil, rustic setting – a candidate for a landscape painting, it seemed. But it...