India is likely to harvest a record 16.5 million tonne pulses this year. This was announced by the Agriculture Minister, Shri Sharad Pawar, at the 6th Agriwatch Global Pulses Summit here today. The Minister said that though India presently imports a large quantity of pulses, the use of new production technologies and agronomic practices, and government support will lead to self sufficiency. Shri Pawar said that more aggressive promotion of available technologies...

A parliamentary committee has asked the government to consider incentivising private players to set up grain storage facilities as it prepares to implement the right to food. The government will require around 620 lakh tonnes of foodgrain annually to implement the food security law. The official procurement stood at 539.75 lakh tonnes in the recent marketing year. “(The) government should provide soft loans at affordable rates and subsidies to private players to...

A lot has been said and written about the visit of Barack Obama, the President of USA to India. The corporate media was in the usual over-enthusiastic drive to bring to its readers and viewers all minute details about his visit from where he stayed and what he ate to how many warships, planes and cars accompanied him and how a whopping $200 million was spent per day for the...

Now, India is saying what the government already knew. Two-thirds of India (66%) feel government programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Bharat Nirman and Rural Health Mission are the best way to ensure that the benefits of India’s steroid-charged growth rates reach those who have been left out of the "India Shining" story. A Hindustan Times-CNN IBN survey conducted by research organisation C fore of 1,621 adults...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...