-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's Paddy farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than Paddy itself. "We used to sell Paddy at...

-Business Standard About 6.2 MT of Paddy have been reportedly arrived in the societies across the state Raipur: With Paddy procurement for the kharif marketing season 2014-15 in Chhattisgarh finally coming to an end at midnight, about 6.2 million tonnes (MT) of Paddy have been reportedly arrived in the societies across the state. The Paddy procured this year was over 20 per cent less than the Paddy purchased by the Chhattisgarh in the...

-Down to Earth Instead of burning Paddy straw, farmers in Haryana's Panipat district are using it to farm mushrooms. This has eased pollution, too Athick haze would eclipse the sun throughout the day from late October to early November," says Naresh Kumar of Puthar village in Haryana's Panipat district. Sitting beside neatly piled up Paddy straw in his small 0.2 hectare field, the 40-year-old farmer is reminiscing about the common practice of...

-The Hindu The Shanta Kumar Committee's recommendations to unbundle the Food Corporation of India are in tune with U.S.-led demands raised in the World Trade Organization The Shanta Kumar Committee report, released last week, on a range of issues relating to procurement, storage and distribution of food grains is not only deeply flawed in its reading of the situation on food security, but also short on facts. It was prepared under the...

-The Financial Express Only 6% farmers have gained from selling wheat and Paddy directly to any procurement agency and the diversion of grains from the public distribution system is close to 47%. Against this backdrop, the Shanta Kumar panel's report on reorienting the role and restructuring of Food Corporation of India (FCI) needs to be adopted by the government at the earliest and in totality. This will indeed make for huge...