-IPS News SUNDARBANS, India- When the gentle clucking grows louder, 50-year-old Sukomal Mandal calls out to his wife, who is busy grinding ingredients for a fish curry. She gets up to thrust leafy green stalks through the netting of a coop and two-dozen shiny hens rush forward for lunch. In the Sundarbans, where the sea is slowly swallowing up the land, Mandal's half-hectare farm is an oasis of prosperity. The elderly couple resides...

-Business Standard The wide disparity between the best healthcare & quackery that much of the population must endure is partly to blame for India's apathy Whether Indians in ancient times discovered algebra and the Pythagoras theorem before "selflessly" passing them on to the Arabs and the Greeks as Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan said last week is for agile historians to ponder. Widely accepted is that Indians in ancient times studied...

-PTI Government today said it is promoting use of organic fertilisers and studies have shown that farm yields have not fallen where use of chemical fertilisers was restricted. Rural Development Minister Birender Singh told Lok Sabha a scheme to empower woman farmers has made positive impact as it supplements their income and use of manures like cow dung is encouraged under the scheme. "Yields have not gone down. It has come up......

-The Hindu It can be turned as green manure TIRUNELVELI (Tamil Nadu): Farmers in rain-fed areas of the district have cultivated pulses as intercrop in orchards not only for good revenue but also to benefit from pulses' ability to nourish the soil to ensure better yield in the main crop also. Pulses are cultivated as intercrop in most of the orchards so as to enrich the soil indirectly for enhanced microbial activity as...

-The Hindu Nidoda Vaijanath, who follows an integrated farming model, keeps himself updated by reading, consulting scientists Bidar (Karnataka): How many crops can you grow on six acres? For this enterprising farmer from Bidar, the answer is 11. Nidoda Vaijanath of Kamathana village also keeps cows, buffaloes and sheep and also has a mini-poultry farm. His farm has small patches covered with fig, cashew, ginger, watermelon, lime, mosambi, drumstick, brinjal, coriander, mango and curry...