-The Financial Express A new crop insurance scheme the Modi government is set to roll out shortly seeks to cap the premium paid by farmers at about 3% of the insured value. A new crop insurance scheme the Modi government is set to roll out shortly seeks to cap the premium paid by farmers at about 3% of the insured value, cover a substantial part of the country’s farmland and crop output...

-The Hindu Over a fifth of non-agricultural workers in India commute to work on foot, followed by commutes by cycle, moped or motorcycle and bus, new data from the Census shows. Fewer than three per cent take cars or vans, and over half travel less than five kilometres. On Thursday, the office of the Registrar General of India released data on commutes for the 200 million working Indians who are neither...

-Economic and Political Weekly Despite favourable policy measures, growth of financial institutions and public interventions in the marketing of agricultural produce, the structure of Punjab's agricultural economy makes farmers dependent on commission agents. These agents trap the farmers in a vicious circle of indebtedness. Based on a field survey, this study locates the commission agent system in Punjab's agriculture set-up and recommends reframing it in order to extricate farmers from the...

-DNA The failure of Bt Cotton to ward off pests has pushed farmers to penury The whitefly attack that has devastated the cotton crop in parts of Punjab and Haryana and caused heavy losses to farmers was a disaster that was waiting to happen. Estimates say that some 8 lakh hectare of standing cotton has been destroyed causing damage worth crores of rupees, which has hit farmers hard. This disaster was waiting...

-Down to Earth From providing agricultural information for specific countries to identifying trends in the sector, censuses serve a variety of purpose In the backdrop of a round of country-driven agricultural censuses which will begin in 2016 to gather information and statistics on the global agriculture sector, senior FAO statiscian Jairo Castano discusses with Down To Earth the importance of the exercise. * How helpful are agricultural censuses in gathering information and statistics...