The Union Agriculture Ministry has nominated scientists belonging to the ICAR and state agricultural universities as resource-persons in 70 districts of eastern India in an attempt to give a fillip to the Centre's ambitious programme of extending the benefits of green revolution to the region. With paddy and rice production in Punjab and Haryana showing signs of plateauing, the government has been forced to turn its gaze towards the eastern states...

Violence is back in West Bengal's Purba Medinipur district as the polling date for the 16 Assembly seats here draws close: Communist Party of India (Marxist) cadres are returning, under police protection, to the villages from where they fled in the wake of the Trinamool Congress' stunning successes here in recent elections. In West Bengal's ground zero, Nandigram — located in Purba Medinipur district — the problem is particularly acute. The...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...

Village Panchayat, Kaluana in district Sirsa figures among the best 11 panchayats in the country selected for their better performance in the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) Scheme in 2009-10. While stating this here on Wednesday, an official spokesman said UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh honoured the panchayat in a function organised in New Delhi to mark the fifth anniversary of the scheme. MGNREGA...

Three basic necessities of life — tapped drinking water, electricity connection and sanitation — together are not available to 82% of rural Indian households, a government survey has revealed. The three elements were key in the defining of India's new poverty line earlier this year by the Suresh Tendulkar committee, which said that 46% of rural Indians were poor. The poverty line was based on National Sample Survey Organisation report of...