Some people feel agriculture in India provides employment much beyond its capacity — that is, the number of people working on the farm is many times the actual requirement. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is among the proponents of this view. In his interaction with a group of editors last month, Singh said, “The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of...

Food Corporation of India (FCI) today asserted that loss of foodgrain stored at its godowns is minimal and said the government would add 16 million tonnes of capacity within the next two years. "It's not true to say that storage loss is as high as 30 per cent...Storage loss is less than 0.4 per cent for rice and none for wheat," FCI CMD Siraj Hussain said at a conference. "Bulk wheat-producing states...

Himachal Pradesh has now brought wheat and barley crops under an insurance scheme to protect them from adverse climatic conditions, an official statement said Sunday. The National Agricultural Insurance Scheme will cover wheat and barley crops too across the state during the 2010-11 rabi season, said the statement. Earlier, maize, paddy, potato and ginger crops were covered. Likewise, the government last year initially launched an apple crop insurance scheme in Shimla and...

More public private partnerships are needed to create opportunities for the rural population India might have created its mark in the services sector — especially in information technology — on the global map, but the development of the rural sector still has a lot of ground to cover. Discussing how to innovate rural entrepreneurship towards employment at the India Economic Summit, various speakers called for increased public private partnerships to create...

The “paid news syndrome” in the media should be resisted as part of a larger struggle for democratic rights because corruption in the media directly affects the health of democracy. The struggle has to be waged in the context of media's corporatisation, monopolistic trends and structural decline. These views emerged at a day-long Seminar on “Abridging Freedom and Fairness of the Media: Combating Challenges,” organised by the Rajasthan Working Journalists' Union,...