-Business Standard Monsoon starts withdrawing from northwest, complicating projections for kharif output Monsoon has started withdrawing from the northwestern region of the country, India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Friday. “The southwest monsoon has withdrawn from western parts of Rajasthan,” the department said. The conditions are favourable for further withdrawal of the monsoon from northwest India in the next three-four days, it added. According to economists, it is too early to predict the impact...

-The Indian Express As many parts of the country reel under a back-to-back drought, Kavitha Iyer reports from the region that’s at the centre of the crisis. Weeks before hanging himself from a tree on his farm on June 1 this year, Kalyan Khomne, 55, read out a newspaper report to his son Shahdev. “It was about a farmer’s suicide in our taluka,” says 26-year-old Shahdev. His village, Nandurghat, and the nearby...

-Hindustan Times Three years ago, when representatives from Sukhbir Agro approached farmers in Punjab proposing they sell their farm waste to the company to generate bio-energy, no one believed them. “They proposed to buy our waste… We didn’t believe them,” said Amolak Singh, a farmer. However, as the farmers slowly came around to the idea the green benefits of this move became apparent. Every November, farmers in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and...

-The Times of India KOLHAPUR: As many as one lakh families of farmers in the state opted out of agriculture, their sole profession, in the last five years, according to the latest agriculture Census figures. Experts expressed fears that the trend might continue with the availability of other income sources and tolerance level of the farmers reaching its peak. The final figures of agricultural land holdings for 2015-16 will be released later. According...

-The Hindu Business Line Both the Centre and States need to be prepared for the possibility in peninsular India The bad news is that the met department’s pessimistic monsoon forecast — of it being 7 per cent less than the long-period average (LPA) — is turning out to be right. The monsoon started off with much promise in June, finishing the month with a 16 per cent surplus and kharif sowing doing...