-The Hindu In all the States belonging to the Hindi heartland, less than one per cent of Hindus eat beef/buffalo meat. The number of Indians eating beef and buffalo meat went up from 7.51 crore in 1999-2000 to 8.35 crore in 2011-12 while the total household consumption of beef/buffalo meat went down from 4.44 crore kg per month to 3.67 crore kg in the same time period. These findings come from National Sample...

-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...

-The Financial Express There are several facets to India’s weak pulse economy. Nevertheless, it is a glorious moment for the country as pulse production is expected around 22 million tonnes in FY17 surpassing all previous records. According to the initial estimates of the agriculture ministry, kharif production will reach 8.2 million tonnes against 5.4 million tonnes recorded in the last fiscal. This would be possible due to higher allocation of land to...

-The Indian Express The Centre is pushing and many states are implementing Direct Benefit Transfers – and encountering little political opposition The entire focus on ushering in a direct benefit transfer (DBT) regime for delivering subsidies to the targeted populations has so far centered around cooking gas, and to some extent, on isolated pilot experiments with food subsidy. Agriculture subsidies, especially on inputs other than fertilisers, have largely escaped attention in...