-PTI Researchers from Harvard and NASA have shown that in October and November about half of all pollution in Delhi can be attributed to agricultural fires on some days Boston: Agricultural fires are to blame for about half of the pollution experienced in Delhi in October and November, a peak stubble burning season in Punjab, a Harvard study has found using satellite data from NASA. Many farmers in northwest India typically burn abundant...

-The Indian Express The Supreme Court bench of U U Lalit and A K Goyal, which laid down stringent safeguards before registering a case under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act on Tuesday, took a similar line on the anti-dowry law last July. IT’S A tale of two laws and the same two-judge bench. The Supreme Court bench of U U Lalit and A K Goyal, which laid down stringent safeguards before...

-The Times of India If you are an organic farmer, now you cannot sell your produce through a retailer or other channels unless it is CERTified to be organic and carries a label with information on the organic status of the produce. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has issued a notification recently laying down the requirements organic foods need to comply with. But farmer groups believe making CERTification...

-Livemint.com The only way to solve the farmers’ problem is to make entry to other sectors attractive by creating employment opportunities, and to make it easy to exit farming Farmers have a bad romance with the Indian polity. On the one hand, India loves, even worships, these farmers. On the other, Indian policymakers create the most impossible regulatory environment for the agricultural sector, trapping farmers in a low-income, low-productivity occupation. The latest...

-Livemint.com The National Forest Policy will be an overarching policy for forest management, with the aim of bringing a minimum of one-third of India’s total geographical area under forest or tree cover New Delhi: India’s environment ministry has unveiled a draft of the new National Forest Policy (NFP) that proposes to restrict “schemes and projects which interfere with forests that cover steep slopes, catchments of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, geologically unstable terrain...