Reaping gold through cotton, and newsprint

“Not a single person from the two villages has committed suicide,” said a full page news story in the Times of India in 2008 on how Monsanto's Bt Cotton had miraculously transformed the lives of farmers in Maharashtra. Three years later, the same story was reprinted by the agri-tech company as a full-page advertisement in the same newspaper. The Hindu 's Rural Affairs Editor, P. Sainath, visited those villages recently to see first hand what kind of transformation had taken place. It turns out the villagers themselves have a different >story to tell.