-The Indian Express In 2006, the Rural Development Ministry under then minister Jairam Ramesh had inked an agreement for the publication of an annual India Rural Development Report by the IDFC Rural Development Network. An overwhelming majority of rural, landowning households in the country are Hindus — with their number growing between 2004-05 and 2011-12 — while Muslims constitute only a small minority, a new government-endorsed study has found. According to the...

-Deccan Herald Twenty years, 35 villages and over 10 lakh surviving trees. Harshavardhan Sheelavant narrates a community initiative in Dharwad district that has converted hundreds of acres of fallow land into green orchards and transformed the lives of farmers. It was another monsoon day without rains. But the dry spell didn’t quench the spirit of residents of Belligatti village in Dharwad district who assembled near a small hillock on the outskirts of...

-Business World In the run up to Independence Day, Professor Ashok Gulati wrote a scathing critique of what he has described as “elitist biases in public policy”, that ignore the reality of the masses in rural areas. The reality he describes is that of low rates of growth in agriculture; a sector that majority of Indians still depend on.  He lamented the excessive preponderance of economic policy discourse in the country...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: The Sheena Bora murder case, in which her mother Indrani Mukerjea is an accused, is not an isolated incident involving a woman in a serious crime. Last year, as many as 579 women were arrested for murder in Maharashtra. Although way below the number of men arrested for the same crime in the same period (5,187), it is the highest for any state. The crime report for 2014...

-Business Standard The lens with which we report India's farm crisis has to change As we head for another year of trouble in the countryside, it is time to discard the enduring media tropes of rural distress. Like the image of a grizzled Indian farmer, framed against his parched field looking up at an unrelenting sky. Or the all too pervasive conflation of rural distress with farmer suicides. Such characterisation offers the...