-Deccan Herald In the past seven years around 3.2 crore farmers have abandoned farming and taken up menial jobs in the cities. At a time when change is the buzzword on the political landscape, when cities are changing, and the villages are no longer what they used to be; when incomes are rising for an educated few, and when the bottom of the pyramid - those below the poverty line -- are...

-The Indian Express Kutch (Gujarat): Bhajan Singh, 62, remembers the time curious villagers turned up to see a borewell his father Gopal Singh had dug up. The year was 1969 and it was the first time Sumrasar village, near Bhuj in Kutch district, had had a borewell. Few had ever seen it work, as they depended entirely on rainwater for the barely one crop they harvested a year. Originally from Pakistan, Gopal...

-Deccan Herald Between 2005 and 2010, 140 lakh people were displaced from agriculture and 57 lakh jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector. With a bountiful monsoon and a record foodgrain production, agriculture is going to be the saviour of the Indian economy in 2013-14. At a time when there is an all around doom and gloom -- industrial output failing to keep pace, manufacturing sector refusing to look up, joblessness growing,...

-The Business Standard The Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee law allows mandis to remain in the grip of a middlemen cartel, with clear links to politicians who run the governments Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi has, in effect, told chief ministers of party-ruled states that if food inflation is to be controlled, as many items as possible must be got out of the purview of the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act. For the time...

-The Hindu     India wilted under pressure from US: Right to Food Campaign Civil society groups are "extremely disappointed" about India accepting a peace clause with conditionality on its food and farm subsidies at the Bali World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial with no assured mechanism for finding a permanent solution. They are unhappy that India has opened up its farm and food domestic policies, programmes and mechanisms to international scrutiny with large data and...