-The Times of India RAJKOT: A farmer Janak Patel in Abharampara village of Amreli district has seen his entire sowing on 40 bigha Land going waste. He had anticipated rainfall within 30 days of sowing. However, monsoon did not keep its date with the state. "I had sown cotton in 40 bigha Land 30 days ago thinking that rain would come on time. But all has gone waste," said Patel adding that...

-The Deccan Chronicle Kollam (Kerala): Kulasekharapuram, a small panchayat on the border of Kollam district is all set to implement the United Nation's call to observe 2014 as International Family Farming Year, raising the slogan of self-sustainability in food production. The panchayat has two villages, Adinad and K.S. Puram and as many as 12,230 families in 23 wards. The agricultural office of the panchayat had identified the fact that extensive cultivation alone...

-The Hindu They lost chance to cultivate short-duration cash crops due to delayed monsoon Gulbarga (Karnataka): The hopes of Gulbarga farmers, who have lost the chance to cultivate short-duration cash crops such as green gram, black gram and sesamum owing to the inordinate delay in the onset of monsoon, now rest on red gram, the mainstay of growers in the district. Farmers have been deprived of the opportunity to cultivate black gram on...

-The Financial Express MGNREGA must be tweaked in implementation, not design. Before his tragic demise, the Union minister for rural development, Gopinath Munde, gave a clear indication of the new government's priorities on MGNREGA. Both these priorities are vital: using the programme for the creation of productive assets to combat drought and poverty and ensuring timely payment of wages. More than two decades of liberalisation and high economic growth have left India...

-The Business Standard Charge end-users and create more storage structures   Food and energy security are often discussed as goals of critical importance for the Union government. But water security is equally vital - and as gravely endangered. Water is as critical for some key industries, for hydropower production, for freight movement - not to mention for agriculture and households. The worry is that the current scenario, in which national water resources are...