-NDTV KOLKATA: As if the death of 19 tribal children in Odisha due to malnutrition was not bad enough, a minister in Naveen Patnaik’s government has now blamed the disaster on the large size of tribal families. “Each tribal family has 8-9 children. There’s no family PLAnning and therefore the malnutrition deaths,” Minister of Women and Child Welfare Usha Devi said. “They also won’t come down from their village in the hill,” she...

-Frontline The inability to resolve pressing problems with respect to the production, distribution and availability of food is one of the important failures of the entire economic reform process. IN the fateful month of July 1991, when the devaluation of the Indian rupee presaged the introduction of a whole series of liberalising economic reforms, agriculture was very far from the minds of most policymakers and commentators. The immediate focus was on...

-The Hindu Business Line Bengaluru: Pulses such as tur (arhar), urad, moong, and oilseeds — mainly groundnut and sunflower — and maize have turned out to be the hot favourites of farmers, who have brought a larger area under these crops in the ongoing kharif PLAnting season. The prevailing high prices, coupled with an increase in the support price and bonus incentive announced by the Centre, is the main reason farmers in...

-The Indian Express The UP government will challenge the NGT order on the grounds that the Motor Vehicles (MV) Act does not have a provision for deregistration of vehicles. New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh government is PLAnning to move the Supreme Court against the National Green Tribunal (NGT) order directing transport departments in the National Capital Region (NCR) to deregister and impound diesel vehicles older than 10 years. The UP government will challenge...

-India Water Portal How paddy grew in popularity in Punjab and continues to steal the show, thanks to lack of alternatives for farmers. Take the roads of Punjab during the monsoon and you will find most fields turned into pools of water. It’s mainly the water pulled out from the underground vault to support the kharif crop of paddy. Neither a native PLAnt nor suited to the agro-climatic region, paddy has...