The Rice Paradox More than one billion people in India depend on rice fields for their sustenance. They also are becoming one of the most intractable climate issues on earth. The same flooded and glistening paddies that contribute to food security and export economics are also extracting a greenhouse gas – one that is 25…
Singapore supplied nearly a third of every foreign investment dollar that entered India last financial year — more than any other single country. That fact explains why, on 20 August, a five-member ministerial delegation led by Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal joined a 70-strong Indian business contingent in Singapore for the fourth India-Singapore Ministerial…
Across the dusty stretches of Kutch, Saurashtra and north Gujarat, a quiet but determined rebellion has been building through the summer of 2026. Farmers who have spent generations tilling their land are now standing in front of bulldozers and construction crews, refusing to let power companies plant transmission towers on their fields and in the…
The Centre has announced over ₹94,000 crore in rural development commitments for West Bengal, reopening funding for employment, housing, infrastructure, and agriculture after years of political and financial deadlock. The success of the package will depend on timely implementation and sustained fund flow.
The UN’s methane roadmap sets ambitious 2030 targets, but India’s absence from the Global Methane Pledge reflects the challenge of balancing climate action with food security.
Agriculture Under Growing Climate and Disaster Risks India’s agricultural sector is becoming more prone to the dual effects of natural calamities and climate change. In recent years, farmers in various regions of the country have suffered from an increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as unseasonal rain, hailstorms, droughts, floods, cyclones, heat waves, cold…
In the rain-fed rice cultivation areas of Odisha and Maharashtra, drought years are not gender-blind events. In fact, research based on national sample survey data in India, conducted by the Asia-Pacific branch of UNDP, has shown that when rainfall is poor, women farm workers earn less in terms of wages than men, specifically in rice-growing…
The Farmer Who Stopped Growing Rice Govind Nair farmed rice on three acres in coastal Kerala for most of his working life. In 2022, following a government horticulture scheme, he converted one of those acres to coconut cultivation and intercropped it with cocoa. By 2025, the intercropped acre was generating nearly twice the income of…
The Biscuit That Changed a Village Economy Urmila Devi runs a small food processing unit outside Varanasi. She makes millet-based snacks using a government-supported machine, sells them under a cooperative label, and earns three times what she made from raw grain. Before her unit was set up under the PM Formalisation of Micro Food Processing…
The Numbers from Korba Earlier this week, India CSR shared a fresh, detailed update on BALCO’s Vedanta Skill School, bringing in data up to FY2025-26. Since its launch in 2011, the school has helped more than 15,000 young people leave uncertainty behind and start solid, respectable careers. Just in the last year, over 1,200 trainees…
