Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today said the decision on free power to the farm sector will be discussed in the cabinet but rejected the Planning Commission's contention that it was responsible for the alarming depletion of groundwater in the state. "The farmers of Punjab have been using ground water for the crops and the state has helped whole country to overcome food crises many times," Badal said, reacting to...

The Centre's decision to raise the minimum support price (MSP) sharply for pulses, moderately for coarse cereals and oil seeds, and not at all for rice and cotton (the nominal hike for rice merely rolls in the bonus offered last year) is right, in the conventional sense. The signal against increasing acreage for rice this kharif is sound, given the huge stocks with the government. The signalling is right, too,...

India lives in its villages, Gandhi said. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads. India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries. While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years,...

Why is Madhya Pradesh ranked so low in the Millennium Development Goals like child and maternal mortality, extreme poverty, hunger and safe drinking water? Social sector allocation has increased only during the last few years. Before 2005, there wasn’t enough money allocated to it when compared to poverty alleviation schemes. Also, it takes time for the benefits of the allocations to reach people and for real change to manifest itself....

The reported decision of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs taken at a meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to keep the minimum support price of cotton unchanged for kharif season 2010-11 has left three million growers of the state unhappy. Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti president Kishore Tiwari said, "The prices were last revised in 2008-09 and during election year it were raised to Rs 3,000 a quintal more...