-IPS News TIKAMGARH: Eighty-year-old Chenabai Kushwaha sits on a charpoy under a neem tree in the village of Chitawar, located in the Tikamgarh district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, staring intently at a dictaphone. “Please sing a song for us,” urges the woman holding the voice recorder. Kushwaha obliges with a melancholy tune about an eight-year-old girl begging her father not to give her away in marriage. The melody melts...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-The Times of India HYDERABAD: In a major policy shift that could shape the future of agriculture in Telangana, the government on Wednesday said it was getting ready to grow dry crops such as ragi and bajra in view of an impending drought after the killer heat wave in the region. Unseasonal rains in MarchApril had damaged Rabi crops in 75,000 hectares across nine districts of the state, forcing the government to...

-Livemint.com Modi would do well to remember Mao’s dictum of ‘walking on two legs’, which envisaged a balance between agriculture and industry According to one of his ministers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants India to have a China-like dominance in manufacturing. China’s success in manufacturing holds several lessons for India but China’s performance in agriculture is no less remarkable. Over the past few decades, rapid agricultural growth has allowed the Chinese...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com Dehradun: Maletha village in Tehri Garhwal is very angry. Men, women and children sit on the road in dharna, demanding that a stone crushing company grandly called Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram be evicted from their village. The villagers’ problems began in February 2014 when two stone crushers arrived in Maletha with their machines. Their operations created an ear-splitting noise and belched clouds of dust that settled on crops and orchards. In August, another...