Anyone familiar with the farmer suicide crisis in India will know the place Warangal. Located in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, Warangal is considered the epicenter of the farmer suicide crisis. It is here that the farmer suicides by the hundreds were first recorded in 1998.

Finally some good news to report: Marks & Spencer, UK based retailer will continue to invest in the ‘Better Cotton’ Initiative for the next three and a half years. Their press release says the investment will extend to 20,000 farmers in Warangal.

M&S will now continue to fund the project for the next three and a half years to extend the project to 20,000 farmers. It is a joint venture between M&S and WWF. Results from last year include:

• 51 per cent less water use;
• 81 per cent less pesticide ‘active ingredient’ use;
• 53 per cent less synthetic fertiliser use.

Why should we care?

India is currently the 2nd largest producer of cotton in the world (China is #1). And, cotton is a water hog – It can take more than 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton; equivalent to a single T-shirt and pair of jeans.

Saras Sarasvathy, Darden School of Business and Effectuation.org

Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business has a study out on how great entrepreneurs think.

Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don’t start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies. By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

We’re currently watching a live chat with her at Inc.com. The question asked was ‘how do you become a successful entrepreneur.’ Sarasvathy’s answer, “Ask yourself, are you willing to fail?”

Good enough for us.

Food and consumer affairs minister KV Thomas believes that legislating the number of guests and thereby amount of food served at lavish Indian weddings is going to help divert food to millions of starving Indians.

Perhaps the minister should be reminded of two things:

1. Last year food grains enough to feed 600,000 people was found rotting in the Food Corporation of India storage facilities. Chances are they haven’t fixed that storage and distribution problem yet.
2. The government has no business whatsoever interfering in people’s lives even if it finds displays of wealth vulgar and morally questionable.

Here’s three India related stories that grabbed us this morning:

• A centuries old deal making practice of trading with hidden hand signals between buyer and seller [Video at BBC]

• The Capgras Delusion is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a spouse or another close family member, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor. One of 10 disorders that doctors in India are discovering among Indians. [Tehelka: Bizarre diseases striking urban Indians]

• An Indian website is offering bachelors a ‘virtual wife’ to give them a taste of married life before they go through with the real thing. The site lumps women into four categories – devoted homemaker, control freak, shopping & soap opera obsessed and ambitious banker. [Full post at Orange]

Depending on which agency you ask, the value of an American life is between $6 million – $9 million. Read the NY Times piece to get the scoop behind how they came up with that number, and why businesses are having a cow over the calculation.

Extremely important news for us non-millionaires. Basically this means that every breath we take is worth 6-9 million dollars.

Huh. Better get on with it and do something important.