-Livemint.com Modi would do well to remember Mao’s dictum of ‘walking on two legs’, which envisaged a balance between agriculture and industry According to one of his ministers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants India to have a China-like dominance in manufacturing. China’s success in manufacturing holds several lessons for India but China’s performance in agriculture is no less remarkable. Over the past few decades, rapid agricultural growth has allowed the Chinese...

-The Hindu The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employee Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) has generated more rural employment than any other government scheme or private initiative in the history of independent India. At the same time, it has also generated a great deal of controversy over its merits and demerits. It would be fair to say that the policy establishment in the country right now is not favourably disposed towards the MGNREGA, with the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Union agriculture ministry is probing the circumstances under which a senior government scientist purportedly tried to malign vaccines used to protect livestock from foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks that can threaten India's milk yields. An expert panel from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has told the agriculture ministry that Bhoj Raj Singh, a microbiologist at an ICAR research centre, has "caused damage" to the reputation of India's foot-and-mouth...

-The Tribune Transformative approaches to agriculture are the need of the hour. For this, we have to impart climate resilience and rehabilitate economically stressed farming communities of agriculturally developed regions. Since more than two decades now, farmers have been committing suicides in India, a fact that reflects the harsh realities of farming. Most of these farmers were traditional family farmers, leading a lifestyle based on traditions and beliefs. The intensive commercial commodity-based...

-The Times of India India accounts for the highest estimated number of undernourished people in any single country, with an estimated 194.6 million, or about one in every four such people in the world. Globally, the number of undernourished people has fallen by 216 million between 1990-92 and 2015, from just over a billion to 795 million. However, India's contribution to this fall has been small, with its numbers down by just...