-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had stARTed their march from...

-The Indian Express Getting the right remuneration is the most critical issue facing farmers. Government must provide policy, institutional framework for procurement. The farmer and his income is an important theme of discussion these days. A lot is being written on ways to increasing, and doubling, the farmers’ incomes by the year 2022. Viewed arithmetically, the income of a farmer is a function of three things — the cost of cultivation, production...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: States like Jharkhand and Bihar with acute shortage of doctors have seen few new medical colleges being opened in the last five years, while those with a glut of MBBS seats and doctors continue to allow new private colleges. This is despite doctors’ associations in these states warning against over-production of doctors. In Jharkhand, a state with the worst doctor-population ratio of just one doctor for...

-The Indian Express This forecast, following a joint exercise by IIT Gandhinagar and the India Meteorological DepARTment (IMD), for the first time, provides a country-wide soil moisture forecast at seven and 30-day lead times. New Delhi: With the rabi season around the corner, a countrywide forecast prepared at the end of the monsoon season suggests deficit soil moisture conditions are likely in Gujarat, Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and southern Andhra Pradesh. This forecast,...

-The Times of India In the next few days, India’s northern region, especially Delhi, is again likely to become among the most polluted places on eARTh because a vast number of farmers in Punjab and Haryana have decided to continue their annual ritual of setting fire to paddy straw. This has brought back the spectre of smog choking the region despite the Centre doling out more than Rs 1,000 crore to the...