-The Hindu Steps like limited procurement, boosting productivity and consolidating land holdings can help reduce agrarian distress Recently, there has been active discussion on the strategies addressing farm distress. There are media reports that the ‘interim Budget’ may focus on the farm sector among other things. Agrarian distress, in the present context, is mainly in terms of low agricultural prices and, consequently, poor farm incomes. Low productivity in agriculture and related supply...

-The Hindu Journalist-author Meena Menon on the crisis of cotton and why India needs to go back to desi varieties There’s a pithy summing up of Bt Cotton in Meena Menon’s 2018 article ‘A lost cotton heritage’. “Bt cotton is like Fair and Lovely,” Kamal Kishore Dhiran, an organic cotton farmer, tells the journalist and author. “Does it really change you or make you fair? Similarly Bt cotton doesn’t address the main...

-Mongabay.com Illegal rat-hole mining in Meghalaya persists despite ruinous effects on the environment The efforts to reach the 15 miners trapped in an illegal coal mine in the East Jaintia hills of Meghalaya since December 13 continue, but they began belatedly and have faced many problems. Doomed from the beginning First, the Meghalaya government has no idea what happens inside these rat-hole mines, which are barely 2 ft wide, since mining is a private...

-The Times of India BEED: Ahead of Republic Day, students of the Kotan zilla parishad school are busy preparing to write an essay on the searing drought that has engulfed their village and the state. When asked what she will say, Pratiksha Pachpute breaks down. “If there was no drought,” says the 14-yearold, her face stained with tears, “my parents would still be with me.” Life has changed for the 8th standard...

-The Indian Express New India cannot view empowerment of women merely as economic resource. Last month, Niti Aayog released a report on state-level progress across various indicators under the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The comprehensive index score on gender equality (Goal 5) revealed that all Indian states, except Kerala and Sikkim, fall in the red zone, signifying low performance. Despite such worrisome findings in its own report, Niti Aayog’s almost simultaneously...