-The Hindu Why the drop in RATes? Garlic has been the latest casualty of the price crash in the vegetable market after poor returns of tomato and potato crops forced many farmers to abandon their produce owing to a bumper output in recent days. The miseries of financially distressed farmers seem far from over even as they continue to demand waiver of farm loans and remuneRATive prices for their produce through several...

-Livemint.com Farmer unions are divided over whether to inconvenience cities with their protests, and as a result the strikes have been limited to a few regions in Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Maharashtra New Delhi: The ongoing protests by farmers attempting to restrict the supply of milk and fresh produce to cities has highlighted differences between farmer unions on modes of protest, especially on the question of whether to risk RATtling urban...

-The Indian Express The son said that after his father's death in 2010, the little produce from a small farm with the family lasted barely two-to-three months. Officials are also probing as to why the woman, or any other member of her family, was reportedly not getting any other government benefits. Ranchi: A 58-year-old woman allegedly died of starvation at a village under Dumri Block of Giridih district in Jharkhand. District officials...

-The Indian Express Closure of Sterlite plant says something about our collective morality: Death, violence move governments more than reason and evidence It took a brazen exercise of what sociologists since Max Weber refer to as the state’s “monopoly of violence” by Tamil Nadu authorities to bring our attention to a problem that had been affecting the local residents of Tuticorin for over two decades. Since this tragic incident, it took hardly...

-The Indian Express The result in the Kairana Lok Sabha seat bypoll, where ganna payment was the main issue, brought forth a crisis born of advances in plant breeding and boost in sugarcane production. Not many would have heard of Bakshi Ram. Currently director of the Sugarcane Breeding Institute (SBI) at Coimbatore, he isn’t as well-known as Norman Borlaug or M S Swaminathan. Yet, the wonder sugarcane variety, Co-0238, bred by...