-The Hindu Business Line A Government report has called for enhancing investment in agriculture and leveraging technology to boost the country's farm sector growth in the years ahead. The report ‘State of Indian Agriculture 2011-12,' released by the Agriculture Ministry on Tuesday, called for institutional reforms in research set up to make it more accountable and geared towards delivery, conservation of natural resources such as water and land among others. “Achieving a 8-9...

-The Economist   Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered...

“Huge subsidy on chemical fertilisers unmindful, useless” Small and marginal farmers have raised the demand for special allocation for organic farming and ecological fertilisation in the forthcoming budget, which finance minister Pranab Mukherjee will present on March 16. According to them, chemical fertilisers, the subsidy for which is likely to touch Rs 1 lakh crore in 2011-12,  are not benefitting the soil and are burdening them with high-cost cultivation instead. “The government...

'Erratic rainfall and rising input costs forcing farmers to migrate' “Unable to clear a loan of Rs 2 lakh, my son committed suicide. I had to sell my ancestral house and cattle to repay the loan,” says Lakshmi Devi, 48, of Pathakotha Cheruvu village in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur district. Devi's woes did not end with the repayment of loan. Managing her farm is becoming increasingly difficult, partly because it is expensive,...

-The Business Standard   A Nandan Nilekani-led task force on an Aadhaar-enabled unified payment infrastructure has recommended setting up a network of one million interoperable micro-ATMs across the country. The ATMs will be operated by business correspondents. The task force, headed by the Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India, submitted its report to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday. The panel has suggested that in order to set-up this network quickly, a last-mile transaction...