-Livemint.com It has repeatedly failed to protect the domestic Food Security agenda The cabinet’s approval of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) on Wednesday is, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous development. As WTO deals go, this is low-hanging fruit. The agreement is to reduce administrative barriers at ports and customs, reducing transactional costs of international trade and consequently—according to various studies—increasing global gross domestic product...

-The Hindu Business Line The scheme has made life easier for the people of this Andhra Pradesh village, one of the first in the state to have 100 per cent financial inclusion. But the local experience also throws up a few questions relevant nationally, reports Gunturi Naga Sridhar Fourty-year-old M Ravamma, from Polavaram, a village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, had a nightmarish experience two months ago. Her husband complained...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre has dropped two Supreme Court-appointed food experts from its reconstituted midday-meal monitoring panel and included a member from an RSS-linked organisation with no expertise on such issues. N.C. Saxena and Biraj Patnaik, the two Food Security commissioners on the first panel set up by former HRD minister M. Pallam Raju, have been dropped by an empowered committee headed by minister Smriti Irani. The top court had...

-Frontline Former psephologist Yogendra Yadav, now a member of the political collective Swaraj Abhiyan, recently toured India’s drought-affected districts. He called it a Samvedna Yatra. During the tour, he took note of the agony in rural areas affected by what he calls “one of the worst droughts in independent India” The drought, according to him, has left farmers and the larger rural community in extreme distress, leading to damaging changes in...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Expressing concern over the sustainability of small farms, Agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh on Saturday said 91 per cent of the total farm holding would belong to small and marginal farmers by 2030. According to the Agriculture Census, the total number of operational holdings in India numbered 138.35 million with an average size of 1.15 hectares. Of the total holdings, 85 per cent are in marginal and small farm...