Madhya Pradesh Farmer Welfare and Agriculture Development Minister Ramkrishna Kusmaria has courted a controversy by blaming farmers’ suicides on their “past sins”. “These are old sins that are resulting in such incidents,”the minister told a TV channel on Wednesday, and elaborated it by pointing to indiscriminate use of “chemicals” that has reduced the fertility and “resistance power” of agricultural land. A few cases of farmers’ suicides have been recently reported from Damoh,...

India's reported willingness to relax its ceiling on cotton exports to accommodate the Pakistani demand for the commodity if Pakistan will permit the overland export of onions is a welcome development. The floods in Pakistan affected some portion of its cotton crop, and the country is now short of the commodity for its domestic textile and yarn industry, the mainstay of its fragile economy; heavy and unseasonal rains have caused...

Depressed over his crop getting damaged due to frost, a farmer attempted suicide by consuming pesticide in Madhya Pradesh's Damoh district Monday. It was the second such incident in the past three days in the district. The BJP government denied that any farmer had tried to kill himself due to debt. State Minister and government spokesperson Narottam Mishra told reporters: 'No farmer has committed suicide due to debt and there is...

A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India. If North America is predominantly made up of new immigrants, India is largely a country of old immigrants, which explains its tremendous diversity. It follows that tolerance and equal respect for all communities and sects are...

Differences within the ruling government alliance over food management came to the fore on Tuesday with home minister P Chidambaram questioning agriculture minister Sharad Pawar's pitch for resuming export of sugar. A meeting convened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss measures to calm soaring food prices saw sugar become a key focus area with Pawar plumping for freeing its export, citing an expected bumper crop this year. As soon...