Huge sums of money are allocated for the rural and agrarian sectors by the Union Government in its annual budget every year, and rightly so. But in the absence of an adequate number of officials in rural areas, can the various schemes and programmes of the government be implemented properly? We will find the answer if we think about this issue deeply and the answer that would emerge should bother...

-The Indian Express Indigenous cattle population is further down while crossbred numbers have gone up. Latest census also shows an eastward shift as West Bengal overtakes UP with highest cattle count. A look at these trends. On Wednesday, the Department of Animal Husbandry & Dairying released the results of the latest livestock census, which provides headcount data of domesticated animals in the country. The census shows a further decline in the...

-The Hindu Business Line Cow population up 18 per cent in seven years but number of oxen plunges 30 per cent The population of cows in the country has risen by 18 per cent in the last seven years, while that of oxen dipped by 30 per cent, according to the latest census of livestock. The total number for livestock was pegged at around 536 million. The provisional data of the 20th Livestock...

  Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...

-The Hindu Confining it to just the Ministry of Rural Development would be the most retrograde step in democratic decentralisation in over a quarter century. If, as The Hindu’s exclusive on Wednesday indicates, Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to close down the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, it would confirm one’s worst fears about his government’s hypocritical approach to grass-roots democracy for grass-roots development. This was a lacuna that was evident in the ‘Gujarat...