-The Economic Times BENGALURU: To fend off an agrarian crisis similar to the one sweeping across parts of north India and prevent farmer suicides, Karnataka has begun to implement a scheme to monsoon-proof the farmer that could turn out to be a national solution. About 35,000 farmers across the state's 175 taluks are implementing the pilot programme by setting up polythene-lined water storage ponds in their fields to prevent water seep age...

-The Hindu They should throw open their content for scrutiny on a daily basis. After the crackdown on NGOs, the government has turned the heat on 179 Community Radio (CR) stations operational in the country, struggling to remain on air on shoe-string budgets, by ordering them to throw open their content for scrutiny on a daily basis. This, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has proposed, should be done on an email. In an...

-Newslaundry.com The circumstances of Nagaraju Koppula’s death point to reasons why our newsrooms continue to be incapable of absorbing people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In a heavily contractualised media industry, unions have become a bad word and journalists associated with unions have come to be looked on as trouble makers. It’s no surprise, then, that lawyers, academics and activists outnumbered journalists at the condolence-cum-stocktaking meeting called on by the Delhi Union of Journalists...

-The News Minute In 1996, when B K Uniyal went through the names of 700 accredited journalists in Delhi, he couldn’t identify a single Dalit among them. He realized that not once in his 30 years in the profession had he met a Dalit journalist. In 2013, Ajaz Ashraf found 21 across the country. On April 12, 2015, that tiny number shrunk even further with the death of Koppula Nagaraju, a...

-The Indian Express While the Home Ministry has decided to put grants from US-based Ford Foundation under the “prior approval category” and also on its watch list in the interest of “national security”, some government-backed educational and research institutes that receive grants from the Foundation have said the US-based organisation helped build institutions in India. Among the beneficiaries of such grants are at least 10 that are also funded and supported by...