-TheStatesman.com Vijay Jardhari, who started the ‘Beej Bachao Andolan’ Uttarakhand in 1986 along with fellow farmers, has dedicated his life to conserving traditional seeds, which otherwise would have disappeared due to wide acceptability of hybrid seeds among farmers Dehradun: Flashback 1986: Whenever farmer and social activist Vijay Jardhari and his friends would visit any village telling locals to conserve their traditional seeds and to continue consuming millets, people would make fun of...

-The Telegraph Hunger kills. In India, it does so with alarming frequency. Three girls aged eight, four and two died in the national capital last week; the autopsy showed that their stomach and bowels were "absolutely empty". This was in spite of the fact that the oldest girl at least went to school and should have been receiving mid-day meals. The blame, as usual, was at first apportioned to exclusion. The...

-GoIMonitor.com The villagers getting management rights under the Forest Rights Act can inspire others “First came the forest, followed by the people, and then the government. Does this chronology allow the newest entrant in the scheme to determine the relationship between the two older entities? In other words, does the new regime of community forest resource bequeath rights or is it merely a recognition of unalienable rights already vested in the communities living...

-Hindustan Times The agriculture ministry has started a new programme to focus on millets or coarse cereal production, mostly grown by small and poor farmers New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has decided to include millets in the public distribution system for which it is procuring these grains at federally fixed minimum support prices, agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said. The agriculture ministry has started a new programme to focus on millets or...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...