-The Indian Express NEW DELHI: The government’s ambitious minimum support price (MSP) scheme to improve farmers’ income has hit a roadblock as Niti Aayog missed the deadline to suggest a viable procurement model. Finance minister Arun Jaitley had announced in his Budget speech the government would ensure agriculture produce is procured at the revised MSP, which will be 1.5 times the production cost. The Centre had entrusted the think tank with...

-The Hindu Asks party MPs to spend a night each in villages where SC/STs make up majority Four days after the Union government filed a review petition in the Supreme Court on its orders concerning the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday asked BJP MPs to reach out to villages where 50% or more of the population belonged to these communities. He was...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-The Hindu The court says it has only protected innocents from falling prey to arbitrary arrests under the Act. The Supreme Court said its March 20 judgment, banning immediate arrest of a person accused of insulting or injuring a Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe member, is meant to protect innocents from arbitrary arrest and not an affront to Dalit rights. The government, despite an urgent and open court hearing of its review petition, failed to...

-Livemint.com While I&B Minister Smriti Irani said that both these bodies were not “regulated/operated” by the government, her Ministry’s statement was the one that defined the punishment and left both the definition of fake news and the nature of the complaint open-ended. In an unprecedented move in an election year, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has amended guidelines for journalists’ accreditation stating that if a journalist is found to have “created and/or...