-The Indian Express Governments have not acted on recommendations of committees on farmer welfare How many more farmers must die before the prime minister condescends to take notice? How many rats must the protesting Tamil Nadu farmers at Jantar Mantar eat before the government acts? How many more fake farm loan waiver schemes will be announced before the cabinet realises that farmers cannot be fooled anymore? Despite 300,000 farmers taking their lives...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Most households covered by government-funded health insurance have to use personal funds to pay for hospitalisation, a study has suggested, iterating concerns about the wisdom of deploying public-funded insurance schemes to seek universal health coverage in India. The study, designed to determine how well government-funded health insurance protects households from health expenditure, has found that 66 per cent of such households who sought healthcare in public hospitals and...

-National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS)   This policy brief, developed by the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, to address the roblem of air pollution due to crop residue burning, provides an innovative viable solution to check burning of rice residues, which is a major contributor to air pollution in the early winter months in North-West plains of India. The Academy hopes that the Central and State Governments of the affected States...

-The Hindu Business Line Mumbai: The flow of agricultural credit may have increased from ?96,000 crore in 2004 to ?10 lakh crore now; about 18,000 new rural branches have been set up and yet there is an agrarian crisis because of definitional dilusions as well as diversion of funds from the needy small farmers, Professor Ramakumaar, Agro Economist, Tata Insitute of Social Sciences (TISS), said on Monday. He was speaking at...

-Livemint.com The regulatory system for the seed and biotech industry should be transparent, science-based, predictable and fair For many decades, the Indian policy framework facilitated the interaction of Science and innovation with entrepreneurship, which led to competition and the subsequent development of an industry structure that delivered sustainable economic benefits. The government was a major contributor to investments in seed research in India for close to three decades after independence. Policy reforms like...