-Frontline The problem in rural India is not one of too much credit to poor households that leads to debt waivers that damage bank balance sheets, but one of inadequate access to credit from formal sources. IF Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, efforts to help Indian farmers by providing them with cheap(er) credit and relieving them of an unsustainable debt burden only harms them in the...

-The Hindu Known for their hunting skills, the Yanadis catch 30 to 40 rats each day against odds in the slushy paddy fields ONGOLE (Andhra Pradesh): Pied piper got rid of rat menace by just playing his pipe in the German town of Hamelin in the medieval period, according to a legend. The job of pest controllers is not that easy as playing a tune on one's pipe despite advancement in science and...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Vegetables are the noble folk of food world, loved equally by doctors and grandmothers. Vegetarians live off them and meat-eaters are told to live off them. But in Delhi, under every crunchy leaf of radish or the shiny brinjal hide dangerous amounts of pesticides that can slowly kill, shows a new study by JNU. Pritha Chatterjee and Aniruddha Ghosal report how growers, consumers and the authorities may...

-The Times of India There is good news and bad news on one of the key problems that haunts India - survival of the girl child. Sex ratio at birth, that is, the number of girls born for every 1000 boys born, has inched up from 906 to 909 between 2007 and 2013. This suggests that female feticide, the monstrous practice of killing off the girl baby in the mothers' womb...

-Business Standard The tribal affairs ministry has drafted revised rules on tribal consent which are now being reviewed by the environment, forests and climate change ministry After approving an ordinance that does away with the need for consent of owners to acquire their land for infrastructure projects and other purposes, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is finalising the dilution of tribal rights over forest land, which will ease and hasten handing...