Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today said the decision on free power to the farm sector will be discussed in the cabinet but rejected the Planning Commission's contention that it was responsible for the alarming depletion of groundWater in the state. "The farmers of Punjab have been using ground Water for the crops and the state has helped whole country to overcome food crises many times," Badal said, reacting to...

The Centre's decision to raise the minimum support price (MSP) sharply for pulses, moderately for coarse cereals and oil seeds, and not at all for rice and cotton (the nominal hike for rice merely rolls in the bonus offered last year) is right, in the conventional sense. The signal against increasing acreage for rice this kharif is sound, given the huge stocks with the government. The signalling is right, too,...

Why is Madhya Pradesh ranked so low in the Millennium Development Goals like child and maternal mortality, extreme poverty, hunger and safe drinking Water? Social sector allocation has increased only during the last few years. Before 2005, there wasn’t enough money allocated to it when compared to poverty alleviation schemes. Also, it takes time for the benefits of the allocations to reach people and for real change to manifest itself....

WITH the introduction of short-term, high-yielding varieties of cereal and oil-seed crops, the cropping intensity has now reached almost 300 per cent in Punjab. Moreover, the intensive use of chemical fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides involve greater use of scarce groundWater resources. The Water table has gone down alarmingly resulting in huge investment on installation of costly submersible pumps to draw Water for irrigation. This does not auger well for sustainable...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has had an unintended side effect: a record rise in the consumption of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) among poor rural families, all thanks to the unprecedented sums of money that the scheme placed in their hands. And the politico-realtor lobby’s record bids for the two-year liquor licences across AP on Monday appears to be in the hope of reaping a bumper harvest...