-The Guardian Rice conservationist Debal Deb grapples with 'mindless Indian elite' to reintroduce genetically diverse, drought-tolerant varieties   Fifty years ago, every Indian village would probably have grown a dozen or more rice varieties that grew nowhere else. Passed down from generation to generation and family to family, there would have been a local variety for every soil and taste - rice that would grow well in droughts or deep floods, which had...

-The Indian Express Urge political parties to include it in their manifesto Ahmedabad: With elections around the corner, farmers in the state came together along with other groups across the country to demand income and livelihood security to be made key promises by all parties. The groups held a meeting at Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad during a seminar on the recent approval of Genetically Modified (GM) crop trials by Environment Minister and Kisan...

-The Hindustan Times India has driven the truck of development - loaded with tar, bricks, glass, concrete...the works - right through its most treasured and fragile green spaces in the last decade. While major cities like Delhi and Mumbai sacrificed green cover for real estate, the country's finest wildlife corridors have been ceded to indiscriminate industrialisation. In the absence of a clear policy to balance development and environment, the Aravallis in Gurgaon,...

-The Indian Express The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) promises 100 days of work to every rural household annually. The government on Friday increased the number of workdays under its flagship rural jobs guarantee scheme for tribal households to 150, but official data show that no more than 11 per cent of Scheduled Tribe households have been able to complete even the promised 100 days of annual employment...

-Press Information Bureau (Ministry of Agriculture) The two-day National Conference on Agriculture for Kharif Campaign has come out with detailed strategy for maximising crop production during the coming kharif season. The focus will be on ensuring timely availability of fertilizers and quality seed and also sufficient credit to farmers. Based on inputs from States and the Fertilizer Ministry, it is established that sufficient quantities of fertilizers and seeds are available in...