-The Hindu Business Line The electronic-National Agriculture Market is a sound idea but implementation is at a nascent stage Farmers in Telangana staged a protest last Monday, demanding discontinuation of the electronic-national agriculture market (e-NAM) platform and restoration of the previous platform provided by NCDEX e-Markets. It followed the failure of the software to accommodate the heavy volumes of the peak season arrivals, beginning with maize and soyabean. The Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC)...

-Livemint.com Maharashtra’s farmer-to-consumer markets and APMC reforms are changing the state’s agriculture sector, long-burdened by economic and political pressures Mumbai: These days, Lata Arun Dimble is out at 8am in her farm in Khed Shivapur. Along with husband Arun and son Ajit, she picks brinjal, tomato, chilly, cucumber, spinach, radish, bitter gourd, cabbage, cauliflower, and green peas. By 11am, the vegetables are loaded onto a mini-truck her husband owns. It’s the same story...

-Livemint.com Spoilage and pilferage are not something the country can afford given its low ranking in the hunger index The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recently approved a proposal to restructure around Rs30,000 crore of food credit given to Punjab state agencies, allowing for the conversion of cash credit into a 20-year loan at a lower interest rate. The central bank also sanctioned a cash credit limit of Rs26,000 crore for this...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-The Hindu The Maharashtra government’s decision to promulgate an ordinance this week to exempt farmers from having to mandatorily sell their fruit and vegetable crop at mandis governed by a 1963 law on marketing farm produce, is a bold and laudable step. That Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has stood his ground against the powerful lobby of middlemen, who shut shop in protest, is even more commendable. The problem with the present...