-Outlook Kanpur: Indian Medical Association (IMA) will be providing free medical facilities and create awareness about good health practices in the villages adopted by it under the 'Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana'. "We have been directed by the IMA headquarters to adopt villages here which will be visited by a team of doctors once in a month. "Free medical facilities will be provided to the villagers and a cleanliness campaign will be launched to...

Despite high prices of fruits and vegetables, India's area under horticultural crops - mainly fruits, vegetables, spices and flowers - has doubled in around twenty years (between 1991-92 and 2012-13). This has resulted in increase in production of horticultural crops nearly threefold (2.8 times). A new report from the Ministry of Agriculture says that the area under horticultural crops during this period rose from 12.77 million hectares to 23.69 million...

-The Indian Express For the last 10 years, farmers in India benefited from both increased production and higher price realisations - leading to rising rural incomes and declining poverty rates. That happy story may now be near its end - which could be the precursor to a renewed crisis in agriculture. The main reason is declining global prices for most agri-commodities (see Table 1). Over the last five-six months, corn, wheat and...

-The Hindu Every effort needs to be made to reform MGNREGA, as it has been both a major success and a huge failure. The best way for this is to study carefully the conditions that made it a success and also to undertake a diagnostics of its failures An impression has gained ground in recent weeks that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre is inimical to the Mahatma Gandhi...

-The Business Standard   NC Saxena, a former member of the National Advisory Council believes that the regulatory regime in the states continues to be oppressive. In an e-mailed interview with Aditi Phadnis, Saxena says that the fundamental problem in India is the low tax-GDP ratio and neither the last government nor the current one seems interested in increasing revenues. Edited excerpts: * The new government appears to be watering down a lot...