-Hindustan Times Patiala: The banned practice of crop-residue burning continues in the district, as farmers are in a hurry to clear their fields for the next crop. On Monday, police booked an offending farmer, Bahadur Singh of Fathepur village on Sangrur road, under Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code (defying the order promulgated by a public servant). “There were more farmers on the spot but Bahadur Singh owned the field on fire,”...

-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...

-The Financial Express For India, a looming freshwater crisis—the World Bank already puts the country’s per capita renewable freshwater resources at less than a fifth of the world, far behind the other four in the list of top-five populous countries—is set to become a nightmare. A study published in Nature Geoscience has found that, upto a depth of 200 metres, 60% of the groundwater in the Indian part of the Indo-Gangetic...

-The Indian Express On Independence Day, we salute our freedom fighters. We also remember Lal Bahadur Shastri who gave us the slogan, jai jawan, jai kisan.   PM Modi needs to move from slogans to action to transform agriculture.   Atal Bihari Vajpayee expanded the slogan to jai jawan, jai kisan, jai vigyan. The present government has an array of slogans for the farmers. Prime Minister Modi has coined so many — swacchh bharat,...

-The Hindu Business Line Govt’s production and distribution processes are out of sync with consumption patterns Of late, with growing income and awareness about nutritious food, there has been a noticeable decrease in the consumption of rice (a high-carb food) in Indian households. This change in consumption pattern, however, is not reflected in India’s agriculture policy which continues to revolve around rice and wheat. Moreover, current policies related to production, procurement, storage...