-The Telegraph Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee government should have calculated the costs of possible retaliation by other states before banning potato export from Bengal, agriculture experts have said. For now, no state has threatened a payback for the ban, clamped despite pleas from the chief ministers of Odisha and Assam after a shortage pushed up potato prices in Bengal. As the Bengal administration grapples with the problem, importers of essential foodstuff have sounded...
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Tit-for-tat plan in potato row -Sandip Bal
-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: The Bengal government-designed potato shortage has prompted Vegetable sellers in Odisha to plan a retaliation. The traders' associations in Balasore have threatened to detain trucks carrying essential commodities and fish from Andhra Pradesh and other states to Bengal on the national highway passing through this district in retaliation to the Bengal government's decision. Despite chief minister Naveen Patnaik requesting his counterpart in Bengal, the largest supplier of potato to Odisha,...
More »Born in Bengal, ‘sold’ in Delhi-Imran Ahmed Siddiqui
-The Telegraph New Delhi: Some 55,000 women and girls trafficked from Bengal are working as maids in Delhi, many of them "sold as bonded labourers" to wealthy households where they slog for ungodly hours without pay and are often tortured or sexually abused. More than half these women are minors - many as young as 10 - who are duped with promises of a better life and brought to the capital by...
More »Safety in food security -VR Krishna Iyer
-The Hindu While making grain available to all is important, it is equally essential to ensure that all food supplied for consumption remains unadulterated and uncontaminated. When India became independent, the Constitution declared it to be a socialist, secular, democratic Republic. The first fundamental right under the Constitution sets down that every citizen has a right to life. This has been interpreted by the highest court as every citizen's right to a...
More »The row over GM crops
-The Business Standard Bt brinjal in Bangladesh calls for a policy review by India With Bangladesh approving commercial farming of Bt brinjal - a genetically modified (GM) crop developed using technology that evolved originally in India - the moratorium put on tests of a similar gene-altered version of this Vegetable by New Delhi is likely to give rise to fresh complications. Given the highly porous border between the two countries, ingress of...
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