-The New York Times   As politicians scramble for India's 815 million votes in the most expensive and closely contested general election in the nation's history, an unexpected protest is rumbling from what was once one of the country's most placid voter blocs: its farmers. The protest is inflamed by rising attention to the shocking suicide rate on India's hardscrabble farms. Since 1995, more than 290,000 farmers have killed themselves. Though that figure,...

-The Hindu   With an El Niño brewing, there is disquiet over what that might mean for the coming monsoon. Many droughts experienced by this country have, after all, been associated with the exceptional warming of the equatorial waters of the Pacific that is characteristic of an El Niño. The forecast issued by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Thursday is in line with other predictions that warn of poor rains this...

-The Hindustan Times   Kokrajhar (Assam): Nearly two years after deadly ethnic riots led to more than 100 deaths and displaced over 4.5 lakh people in Kokrajhar region of Assam, fear and tension prevails. Communities - especially, the Bodos and Bengali-speaking immigrant Muslims - living in close proximity across the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District appear to be completely polarised. In the small village of Joyma a few kilometres from Gosaigaon, around 150 Bengali-speaking...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: Giving an important clarification on live-in relationships, the Supreme Court has said that if a man and woman "lived like husband and wife" for a long period and had children, the judiciary would presume that the two were married. A bench of Justices B S Chauhan and J Chelameswar on Monday issued the clarification on a petition filed by advocate Uday Gupta, who had questioned...

-The Hindu   Adilabad (Andhra Pradesh): The taste of tamarind is likely to turn more tartaric this season given its higher market price at Rs. 70 to Rs. 80 a kg despite the bumper crop. "The crop is good but the cumulative yield is not commensurate as many of the huge old trees have been felled mercilessly in rural area," Killare Namdev, a tamarind trader from Yavatmal in Maharashtra, gives out the reason...