Food Corporation of India (FCI) today asserted that loss of foodgrain stored at its godowns is minimal and said the government would add 16 million tonnes of capacity within the next two years. "It's not true to say that storage loss is as high as 30 per cent...Storage loss is less than 0.4 per cent for rice and none for wheat," FCI CMD Siraj Hussain said at a conference. "Bulk wheat-producing states...

Gujarat government has calculated that the state's farmers suffered losses to the tune of Rs 4,000 crore last year as a result of export restrictions imposed by the Government of India on raw cotton. "Thanks to the restrictions, Gujarat's farmers, who exported most of the raw cotton being produced in the state, were forced to sell the commodity to the yarn mills of south India at a price which is...

At least 29 of the 66 migrants crushed to death in east Delhi when a building collapsed on Monday night hailed from Bengal. The figure signposts the exodus of an abandoned generation and the inability of a state to retain its young or equip them for a better life elsewhere. The death of so many Bengalis has brought out in the open troubling issues that policymakers — both in the state...

It is two weeks now that the state cotton federation has launched procurement but not a single farmer has turned up to sell cotton at its collection centres because of the huge gap between minimum support price and the open market rates. But private traders are now being accused of cartelising in order to pull down prices as it has become a buyers` market. Nearly half a dozen incidents of clashes...

Himachal Pradesh has now brought wheat and barley crops under an insurance scheme to protect them from adverse climatic conditions, an official statement said Sunday. The National Agricultural Insurance Scheme will cover wheat and barley crops too across the state during the 2010-11 rabi season, said the statement. Earlier, maize, paddy, potato and ginger crops were covered. Likewise, the government last year initially launched an apple crop insurance scheme in Shimla and...