-The Hindu Business Line Hyderabad: The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Indian Institute of Millets Research (IIMR) and the Karnataka Government will form a consortium along with other stakeholders to promote millets. The consortium will work on product development and build a brand for Karnataka ragi (finger millet). “There is a need to change the image of millets. Make them more modern and create a buzz around them. Developing...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-Business Standard Pulses acreage in the current Kharif season is almost 40 per cent more than last year and is even more than the average area covered in last five years The stupendous increase in sowing of pulses during the ongoing kharif season didn't escape Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s eye. During his Independence Day speech, the PM commended farmers for raising the area under pulses this season to almost 1.5 times more...

-Earth Island Journal It’s too early to hail Sikkim’s transition to chemicals-free agriculture an outright success, say observers Sikkim, the picturesque northeastern Indian state in the eastern Himalayas, announced in January that it had transitioned completely to organic agriculture — the first state in the South Asian nation to do so. The process of shifting to organic agriculture was initiated by the state government 13 years ago when it launched the Sikkim Organic...

-The Hindu Chennai: Even as various agencies push farmers to take up cultivation of pulses, questions about seed availability and procurement are making agriculturists think twice about taking it up. Pulses bring in more profits, take lesser time to grow, require lesser water than paddy and fix nitrogen in the soil, thus reducing the use of fertilizers for the next crop. “Though the price of pulses in the retail market is quite...