-The Hindu Business Line Millers welcome move, but seek more time to meet new standards New Delhi: To minimise water pollution and wastage, the Centre has notified stricter environmental standards for sugar mills. Under the new norms, which come into effect immediately, the permissible specific wastewater discharge has been halved to 200 litres/tonne of cane crushed against 400 litres/tonne earlier. The final treated effluent discharge has been restricted to 100 litres/tonne. “This will...

-The Hindu Crop insurance has always been a knotty issue with the two previous ones, National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NIAS) of 1999 and the Modified NAIS of 2010 failing to address the concerns. Hyderabad: Agriculture scientists, NGOs and farmer leaders have picked holes in the recently launched Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima Yojana (PMFBY) touted as the much-awaited ‘suraksha kavach’ (shield) and panacea for all crop insurance related ills. Crop insurance has always been...

  A French journalist once wrote: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps the same can be said about nutritional status of children in West Bengal at present in comparison to the past. At the time when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was entertaining private capital in Singur and Nandigram, the rate of undernutrition was quite high in his state. A little less than...

-Hindustan Times A little over a 100 kms south from the city of Ahmedabad, in the lush green cotton fields, speckled with creamy white cotton buds, locals will regale you with stories of farmers who sold their land and got rich. There is one about a few farmers in a nearby village, who sold their land to a corporate and bought the “chaar bangle waali car” (referring to the Audi logo)....

-PTI TRAI had earlier invited public comments to firm up its views over services that lead to differential pricing of data. January 14 was the last day for countercomments. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) only received 21 comments from individuals and organisations countering 24 lakh submissions over its paper on differential pricing of data, a key aspect of net neutrality. Telecom operators, including Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications, through...