-Livemint.com Courts are finally protecting individual liberty in prohibition and beef ban cases The politics of alcohol consumption and cow slaughter have, of late, run roughshod over issues of constitutional law and philosophy. The Patna high court’s recent judgement on prohibition in Bihar—especially when read together with the Bombay high court’s earlier beef ban verdict—is a necessary redressal of the balance. These judgements are a nuanced look at how the relationship...

-PTI New Delhi: As pulses continued to soar to touch up to Rs 200 per kg, intelligence agencies were on Thursday asked to crack down on cartels, while futures trade was curbed to check speculation and buffer stock was hiked over 5-times to 8 lakh tonnes to boost supply in a multi-pronged approach. Efforts were also beefed up to sell larger quantities of pulses at highly-subsidised rates through government agencies and outlets,...

-DNA Taking up the gauntlet against alarming malnutrition in India, the Indian Council of Medical Research has announced a new comprehensive national nutrition survey, unlike any done before. This survey aims to unite the efforts and data of all scattered surveys that have happened in the country, the Rapid Action Survey of Children (RSoC), the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for example,and bring on board as equal stakeholders the union ministries of...

-Hindustan Times Parbhani: It took Pandurang Shinde three trips to the weekly Khandoba cattle bazaar in Parbhani, one of the eight drought-hit districts of Marathwada, to find a buyer for his pair of bullocks. After much heckling, he managed to sell his coveted pair at Rs 50,000, half the price at what the animals had cost him. The weekly cattle bazaar, held on Thursdays, at Parbhani taluka is packed these days, full...

Amidst the prevailing gloominess over agrarian crisis, a recently released report says that the growth rate of agricultural output in both India and China were the same during 2008-2013. The agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) of both these countries on an average grew at 3.3 percent per annum during that period. The latest available data from the 2016 Global Food Policy Report, however, indicates that the neighbouring countries of Sri Lanka...