-The Hindu This agriculture dept. offering will also help them find out fertilizer availability Tamil Nadu: As farmers in the delta districts eagerly await the opening of the Mettur dam, they are also thinking of other things they need – seeds and fertilizers. To ensure that farmers get their inputs on time, the agriculture department has recently introduced a system whereby they can check availability online. Using smart phones, it has linked 9,600...

-Economic and Political Weekly There are basic methodological and conceptual problems with recent research that ends up arguing that private school education is more effective than public education. Such findings have obvious policy implications but it is critical that research that informs policy is based on a correct reading of facts, keeping the larger vision of education in mind. Recent research into the cost effectiveness of public education vis-à-vis private education concludes...

-The Hindu Business Line But they needn’t, if India sticks to the view that the benchmark price for measuring extent of support is too low and outdated India is concerned over the delay in reaching a ‘permanent solution’ to the problem of dealing with food procurement subsidies. The WTO members are thrashing out a work programme for the 10th Ministerial to be held in Nairobi this December. Under Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), developing...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Backed by better monsoon rains so far as compared to the same period in 2014, the kharif (summer crop) sowing operation has picked up substantially in the last three weeks. The sown area touched 563 lakh hectares as on Friday which is nearly 62% more than what the country had reported at this time last year. The fast pace of sowing raised hopes that the total...

-IPS News LUDHIANA: Long-term agricultural growth in India is slowing down. The lands that saw remarkable increases in productivity in the 1970s and 80s, thanks to the technology rolled out as part of the first “Green Revolution”, are not yielding the same results today. India still has the second highest number of undernourished people in the world. To confront this problem, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for a Second Green Revolution on Indian...