-Business Standard Representatives of agriculture universities and institutions have also been included in the panel. Joint secretary (crops) in the Ministry of Agriculture will be the member secretary in the panel Nearly eight months after the Government repealed the three controversial farm Acts, it has constituted a high-powered panel under the chairmanship of former agriculture secretary Sanjay Agarwal to make the minimum support price (MSP) mechanism more effective and transparent as promised...

-The Telegraph Twitter is making journalism lazy Some sixteen years after the micro-blogging site was created,Twitter occupies more mind space on an hourly basis than its social media rivals. It is currently most used for news breaks in times of conflict,revolution or negotiation and for direct communication by politicians and Governments. The rest of the time it offers opinion-mongering by journalists and the public at large and becomes a platform for journalists and...

-Newsclick.in With wheat stocks at a 14-year low and procurement at a 20-year low, how is the ration system going to deliver this staple to crores of people? At the end of June this year, Government procurement of wheat was about 188 lakh tonnes, dramatically down by 57% from last year’s 433 lakh tonnes, as per official figures. This is the lowest procurement amount in the last two decades. It was back...

-Scroll.in A welfare scheme is not the space for technological experiments. In a state with poor nutrition, the Government should act against corruption and exclusion. Ration dealers were siphoning off more than half of the grain entitlement of ration cardholders. That is what residents of several villages in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district noted at a recent public hearing on the functioning of the public distribution system in the area. The statements of participants...

-The Telegraph Senior official says deaths are highest in 'recorded' history of the state Guwahati: Assam has suffered 195 human casualties in the two waves of flood that have hit the state between April 6 and July 15 this year, leaving behind a trail of unprecedented destruction, affecting one third of the state’s over 3.2 crore population and triggering a massive rescue and relief operation. According to chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, besides...