-Livemint.com * Market participation is meaningless without information. Should every Indian farmer get a smartphone? * Without internet Connectivity and market intelligence, the transaction cost associated with selling in places outside the local market are higher than the value of the produce FATEHPUR: Kamlakant is a smallholder farmer in Daulatiyapur village of Fatehpur district in Uttar Pradesh. He is an enthusiastic vegetable cultivator and every season, he searches for answers to three basic...

-The Hindu Women brave arduous journeys to reach hospitals. BHUBANESWAR: After walking down two hills, taking a boat across a huge reservoir and then finally travelling 30 km on bumpy country roads in a rickety autorickshaw, the actual process of giving birth was not difficult at all for 35-year-old Kusum Nayak. The labour pains pale into insignificance for the pregnant women of 16 largely tribal villages under the N. Podapadar panchayat in Odisha’s...

-Centre for Science and Environment * Niti Aayog vice chairperson Rajiv Kumar releases the report, which provides the real picture of organic farming in India: only 2 per cent of India’s net sown area organically farmed, and a mere 1.3 per cent of farmers registered to do organic farming * Organic and natural farming must be upscaled to make Indian agriculture sustainable, says the report * Needs to be turned into a mass...

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the persistent digital divide afflicting rural India owing to poor and insufficient internet Connectivity. With the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech acknowledging the need ‘to complete’ internet Connectivity to villages, there is a renewed vigour and interest in the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN)/BharatNet project. An important question to pose when translating policy to project is: when should...

-The Indian Express While the Sikkim government has launched the Sikkim Edutech App to help students from Class 9-12 cope with the learning loss, it's the junior students and those in far flung areas who were left with little support. Sometime in April, with Covid forcing schools shut, Indra Mukhi Chhetri, a maths and science teacher in a rural area of South Sikkim district, began worrying about her students. While schools were...