-Livemint.com India’s weather office has forecast a normal monsoon. Bountiful rains in the June-to-September period are critical for about 800 million Indians who depend directly or indirectly on farming New Delhi: Gangabhishan Thaware, a 53-year-old farmer from the drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra, took an unusual step in July last year. Thaware and his fellow villagers had toiled on their fields and spent thousands of rupees on seeds and fertilizers, hopeful...

-Livemint.com Farmers continue to be vulnerable to frequent episodes of losses that neither the state nor the markets have been able to mitigate The dramatic long march to Mumbai involving thousands of distressed farmers on 12 March is a remarkable feat of peaceful protest against the state, given its apathy towards farmers’ distress as well as its failures in safeguarding tribal land rights. However, what is surprisingly missing in this poignant narrative...

-Down to Earth Genetically modified food items are flooding Indian markets with seemingly no trouble at all Just last year the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) had told the Supreme Court that “GM (genetically modified) foods are not allowed in the country” and yet no action has been taken against the GM foods flooding Indian markets. The Coalition for a GM-free India has complained to the FSSAI with pictorial...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between states. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...

-The Indian Express To ensure traders in Madhya Pradesh are not able to manipulate markets too much, the state has taken prices prevalent in two other states as well to calculate a reference price. The Centre is yet to work out the modalities of its MSP-based deficiency payments scheme, but if Madhya Pradesh’s just-concluded Bhaavantar Bhugtaan Yojana (BBY) is anything to go by, the scheme will be a costly one. Market arrivals of...