-Outlook Mumbai: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today hinted at more sops for the troubled farmers, saying the unseasonal rains in March have resulted in an "agrarian crisis". Jaitley asserted that the government is committed to allocate more resources to the farm sector, which he identified as the biggest challenge for high growth. "Agriculture is the biggest challenge and the unseasonal rains have resulted in an agrarian crisis," Jaitley said here this evening at...

-The Hindu As the proposed amendments to the Juvenile Justice Act, 2000, passed in the Lok Sabha on May 7, faces the Rajya Sabha hurdle, several child rights experts have begun to challenge its premise for treating adolescents accused of heinous crimes on a par with adults. Their primary contention is that the basis for proposing such amendments for stringent action is flawed and unlikely to act as a deterrent. Victim, not...

-India Today Ahmedabad: IIT-Madras graduate Kannan Lakshminarayan dusted a few copies of "Young India" to find Mahatma Gandhi's vision and initiate cotton farmers to use miniature spinning machines right in their village where they grow the crop and increase their income. Following this, the middleman was out, the long-drawn value chain was short-circuited while farmers became spinners first and subsequently, weavers and even garment makers. In 1920, Mahatma Gandhi had written in...

-Hindustan Times Ludhiana: Like every year, the farmers in the district have started burning stubble despite ban on such a practice. The agricultural experts and officials have been appealing to the farmers to avoid this practice but the farmers seem to be least concerned about it. Stubble burning can be noticed round the clock at every rural pocket of the district. According to the experts, it not only depletes the soil health but...

-Hindustan Times Sheopur: The tribals of 106 villages in Madhya Pradesh have either demolished government made toilets or are using them as storerooms, say government officials, admitting that one of the reasons behind this was faulty design. This happened just 450 kilometres from Bhopal in Sheopur district villages where the government had built about 13,000 roofless, waterless and three-walled structures’ in the name of toilets in 2008-09 under its rural sanitation scheme. Many...