-The Financial Express How can the cotton and soybean farmers of Vidarbha and Marathwada supplement their incomes so they can get out of the trap of debt and self-engineered death? That was the theme of Union minister Nitin Gadkari’s ninth edition, four-day agricultural exhibition at Nagpur, called Agrovision, to which I was invited.  A promising beginning has been made. In October last year, the National Dairy Development Board commenced operations. It...

-The Times of India Nagpur: Monocrotophos, one of the pesticides used by majority of the victims, was removed from the list of recommended chemicals by Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR) much before spraying claimed over 40 lives in the region. The premier research agency of the central government issues advisories related to use of pesticide combinations on the cotton crop. Considering its hazardous nature, monocrotophos-based chemicals were removed from the list....

-Livemint.com The regulatory system for the seed and biotech industry should be transparent, science-based, predictable and fair For many decades, the Indian policy framework facilitated the interaction of science and innovation with entrepreneurship, which led to competition and the subsequent development of an industry structure that delivered sustainable economic benefits. The government was a major contributor to investments in seed research in India for close to three decades after independence. Policy reforms like...

-PTI The study further said digital payment companies have seen a substantial jump in business following the government's push towards cashless transactions after the note-ban last November, and the major contributor to this Growth was online payments. Mumbai: The debit and credit card transactions have jumped to Rs 74,090 crore in September this year, up a hefty 84 per cent as compared to the same month last year when it stood...

-Livemint.com Tractor sales have gone up in a year which has seen farmer protests in several states for remunerative crop prices and farm loan waivers, amid lingering effects of demonetisation and GST implementation New Delhi: Domestic tractor sales rose to a record in the first half of the fiscal year, but economists are hesitating to interpret it as a sign that the farm economy has finally turned the corner. Tractor manufacturers sold 363,071...