-Hindustan Times New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Friday dismissed a PIL seeking enactment of a law prohibiting the slaughter of cows and the sale of beef and such products across the National Capital Region, terming it as “misconceived”. A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath declined to entertain the plea after the AAP government informed the court that there was already the ‘Delhi Agricultural Cattle Preservation...

-Hindustan Times Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh government will prepare a legal framework for leasing land for agriculture that would not put the land owner at a disadvantage but will provide rights to the lease holder, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Tuesday. Chouhan was addressing the media at the conclusion of an exercise launched by the state government to assess the ground situation against the backdrop of the farming crisis. He said that...

-Hindustan Times Chandigarh/Patiala: After a bumper paddy crop, the fields are on fire in Punjab and Haryana, polluting the air with hazardous particles. Strangely, there wasn’t much hue and cry till a thick blanket of smog — a mixture of smoke and fog — enveloped Delhi, making city residents breathless. It’s the farmers of the two food-bowl states who are being blamed for the sudden deterioration in air quality and smog in...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Hindustan Times Small and marginal farmers comprise 85% of the land holdings in India. Social protection is a survival tool for the rural poor, who have no easy access to wage labour. India recognised the need for social protection early on and introduced a slew of social protection programmes like the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides 100 days of assured labour wages...