-The Hindu Chennai: Even as various agencies push farmers to take up cultivation of pulses, questions about seed availability and procurement are making agriculturists think twice about taking it up. Pulses bring in more profits, take lesser time to grow, require lesser water than paddy and fix nitrogen in the soil, thus reducing the use of fertilizers for the next crop. “Though the price of pulses in the retail market is quite...

-The New Indian Express Chennai: In the quiet corners of the State, farmers of five panchayats have been silently revolutionising pulse farming. Under ‘Pulse Panchayat’, an MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) initiative, over 1000 farmers in Pudukkotai have managed to achieve a 60% increase in the yield and also increasing the land under pulses cultivation in the three years since the project was started in 2013, the farmers said. What was first started...

-Hindustan Times Mumbai: The government’s ambitious plan to interlink India’s rivers for better distribution of water across the country may need to be tweaked to factor in the effects of climate change. An analysis of weather data for 103 years (1901 to 2004) by researchers from the Indian Institutes of Technology in Mumbai and Chennai shows that rainfall has decreased over the years, reducing water stocks even in river basins that have...

-The Hindu Business Line Price increases in inputs may raise break-even for poultry farmers and keep egg prices up There’s a hue and cry about the soaring price of pulses, the primary source of protein for Indian vegetarians. But non-vegetarians, or more precisely eggitarians, too, don’t have it easy. Prices of their key protein source have been hitting record levels in recent months, with retail egg prices in some pockets of the...

-The Indian Express Floods and water-logging show that urban planners have paid scant respect to hydrology Rains have been good this monsoon season so far. But instead of welcoming the bounty, urban India seems to be wallowing in misery. Guwahati is flooded. People in Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai and Hyderabad are beset with water-logged streets and traffic snarls. Even half an hour of rainfall is enough to make a lot of places go...