-The Business Standard In 2009-10, number of days a household got employment in a year in rural areas of Rajasthan was about 38, which steadily dropped to 23 in 2012-13 Rajasthan and Karnataka, which used to be stand-out performers of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)'s flagship scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), of late, are showing signs of faltering in terms of execution, raising a question mark on...

-The Hindu The chopping off of the palms of two migrant workers is a wake-up call The gruesome incident of the chopping off of the palms of two migrant labourers of Kalahandi district of western Odisha by the labour contractor mafia in December 2013 should serve as a wake-up call. The incident highlights the ruthless extent to which the mafia can go to meet its ends and brings home the fact that...

-The Hindu Appachi eco-logic cotton project is a unique organic cotton contract farm model in the Western Ghats region of Kabini Reservoir. The project covers nearly 1,200 farmers spread over 1,875 acres. Over 17 per cent of the area comes under reserve forests of both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and exposing the cultivation fields to wild animal attacks is forcing farmers to start cotton cultivation on a mono cropping basis instead of...

-The Business Standard The National Optic Fibre Network project aims to connect 2.5 lakh gram panchayats across the country with optical fibre The government is likely to miss the deadline for its dream project - National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) to connect 2.5 lakh gram panchayats across the country with optical fibre for offering 100 megabit per second (mbps) broadband services. The much-talked-about NOFN project, which was initiated in 2011 with the approval...

-The Indian Express On the surface, the sugar crisis in Uttar Pradesh may seem to be inching closer to a resolution. But cane farmers may have unwittingly mortgaged their land, signing up for crop loans from public sector banks, with the money so raised being used by the mills to pay arrears of a different set of farmers. This model, of mills rotating working capital loans from banks, to deliver pending payouts...