-Livemint.com The RBI-commissioned study listed faulty crop choices and aspirational consumption patterns as other major factors for farmer suicides New Delhi: Shame arising out of inability to repay loans taken from relatives and acquaintances is a key reason for farmers resorting to suicide, a study commissioned by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) found. The study titled “Lives in debt: narratives of agrarian distress and farmer suicides”, conducted by researchers at Shiv Nadar...

-PTI Stating that the agriculture sector is under distress, he said farm holdings are very small in size Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said the government has no plans to tax agricultural income, including that of prosperous farmers, saying a rich farmer is “a very rare institution” and not the norm.   In an interview to PTI, he said the farm sector is in distress and there was no question of taxing agricultural income. NITI...

-Scroll.in Instead of wages for a short period of time, the family running the project in Lanka village will create an asset for life. Mahavir Parhaiya’s household in the remote village of Lanka in Latehar district of Jharkhand is bustling with activity. They are busy working on setting up a mango plantation on what was once a barren plot near their house, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Acknowledging that women are a disadvantaged section despite comprising nearly half of the population of the country, the Centre is considering lowering income tax for single women, introducing Aadhaar-linked health cards for free basic health check-ups for women and cashless medical service for those who are pregnant. A national policy for women, framed by a group of ministers headed by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, is...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The World Health Organisation has announced a plan to approve generic versions of two expensive bio-therapeutic anti-cancer molecules in an effort to make them available to low and middle-income countries. It said it would invite manufacturers to submit applications for pre-qualification of biologically similar versions of rituximab, used to treat chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and trastuzumab, used to treat breast cancer. The pre-qualification process is a mechanism...