Consumers may have to pay substantially more for pulses, oilseed, and rice in the coming months if the government accepts the recommendations of an expert panel to increase farm-gate price of these commodities by up to 30%, further stoking food inflation. The Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), under the ministry of agriculture, has recommended a 25% rise in the floor price of cotton, 16% rise in paddy, 30% rise...

-Reuters   PERLE: As a shiny red harvester bounces across the black earth into the first row of sugar cane, excited schoolchildren run after it and several dozen men stand gaping in the wake of its swift progress. It's the first time that Perle, a village on the banks of the Krishna river in Maharashtra state, has seen a machine used for cutting the tough cane. "This machine will harvest my entire field today,"...

Will Vijay Mallya commit suicide for running up huge losses at Kingfisher Airlines," asks Talaka Rajiah, a farmer near Parkala town, 35 kilometres from Warangal in Andhra Pradesh's Telangana region. "He will not. The government has already thrown some lifelines for him and the airline sector in the Budget," says Rajiah, who also happens to be the secretary of the Telangana Farmers Association. "But when it comes to farmers the...

-The Times of India Taking a cue from the RBI governor D Subbarao, market leader Indian Oil Corporation indulged in grand standing on Tuesday by saying state-run retailers would raise petrol price by almost Rs 10 per litre, if the government did not reduce excise duty or did not compensate their Rs 49-crore daily loss on the fuel. "We have been very patient, not raising prices since December despite our cost of...

If this doesn’t raise a national stink, little else will. Around 3.5 crore toilets are missing in India, if official statistics are not meant to be flushed down the drain. The Union rural development ministry claims its Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) has delivered more than 8.71 crore latrines to households across villages over the past decade. But household data from the population census shows that only around 5.16 crore households had latrines...