-Livemint.com Reeling under intense dry spell, state recorded 49% rain?deficit, says regional?disaster monitoring centre Bengaluru: The Karnataka government on Wednesday declared 156 out of the 176 talukas of the state drought hit in the wake of a failed northeast monsoon. This has added to the growing call for the speedy implementation of the farm loan waiver to mitigate the deepening agrarian distress. The declaration comes months after several districts of the state...

-Livemint.com Declining income, shrinking farmlands, rise in number of dependents on existing holdings add to farm woes Bengaluru: Since 2000, Karnataka has put nearly 200,000 hectares of farmland to non-agricultural use, including for industrial, residential and infrastructure projects. Besides shrinking farmlands, the number of dependents on existing land holdings have also increased considering little employment opportunities elsewhere. From 1.312 million hectares in 2000-01 (cumulative), the total land put to non-agricultural use has risen...

Just a few days ahead of the Kisan Mukti March in Delhi NCR, the provisional results of the Agriculture Census 2015-16 became available in the public domain. The report, among other things, highlights the long-term problems affecting Indian agriculture including fragmentation of land holdings (particularly the marginal and small ones) and shrinking average size of farm land. The provisional results of the latest Agriculture Census reveal that at the national level...

-Newsclick.in Of the 136 talukas in Maharashtra, which had demanded that they should be declared ‘drought-hit’, only three were “eligible” to be there in the category, as per 2016 manual. Though the India Meteorological Department (IMD) had declared a month ago that as many as 255 districts of the country have witnessed deficit rainfall of 20 to 59 per cent during the South-West monsoon, many of the states are yet to declare...

-The Hindu JPC members want Bangladesh to be excluded. As the deadline for a joint committee of Parliament on the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, nears an end, some members asked whether it was possible to present the Bill in a truncated form by excluding Bangladesh. The Bill proposes citizenship to persecuted Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who came to India before 2014. Violation of equality The...