-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's budget speech has promised a hundred smart cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...

-The Indian Express Three members of a Dalit family in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar were killed, one of them decapitated before being thrown into a dry well in Jawkhede Khalsa village, on the night of October 20. The investigation is still on and the jury out on whether it was an act of caste violence or the result of a dispute. In recent times, however, it seems there is a surge in the...

-IANS NAGPUR: A record 120 debt-ridden farmers are reported to have committed suicide in November in the drought-hit Vidarbha and Marathwada regions of Maharashtra, an activist said here Monday. "While at least 65 farmers ended their lives in Marathwada, another 55 took the extreme step in Vidarbha region," Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti president Kishore Tiwari said. In the past 24 hours alone, around two dozen farm folk have committed suicide, according to available...

-ETV/ News 18 Claiming that the excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides destroyed Punjab in the two decades, volunteers from Punjab - once an agri-role model-have cautioned Madhya Pradesh against the same. These volunteers from Kheti Virasat Mission - a group of volunteer activists from different fields working in Punjab for promoting organic farming, said this while participating in Vikalp Mela as part of Bhopal gas tragedy's 30th anniversary events in...

-The Hindustan Times   The government is planning a "grow safe Food campaign" that could entail new policy initiatives on pesticide use and an awareness drive among farmers in the wake of a study that shows at least 2% of commonly consumed fruits and vegetables could be poisonous. The government-sponsored study, ‘Monitoring of Pesticide Residues at National Level', continuously tracked pesticide use between April 2009 and March 2013 for possible presence of organo-chlorine,...