-Live Mint About 30% of 5,350 farmer households surveyed said they would vote for the BJP New Delhi: A third of farming households, a key electoral constituency, are likely to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming general election, says a survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for Bharat Krishak Samaj, a farmers' association. About 30% of 5,350 farmer households surveyed across 18...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: A Rajya Sabha Committee on Petitions has urged the government to review meat export policy and recommended not to grant permission for any new slaughter house until a critical analysis by a dedicated commission is complete. It also advocated a review of policy of giving subsidies to meat exporters. The report was submitted on February 13 by a 10-member committee headed by Bhagat Singh Koshyari. MP from...

A new report by National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS) reveals that despite the nutritional value of millets, otherwise known as coarse cereals*, there has been a drastic reduction in the area under its cultivation from 36.34 million hectares in 1955-56 to 18.6 million hectares in 2011-12 thanks to the wrong agricultural and price policies adopted by the Government (see table 1, and the links below). Based on previous National...

-Outlook A parliamentary committee has picked holes in the ambitious agriculture debt waiver and debt relief scheme of the UPA government saying it could not achieve its goals due to a variety of reasons including violation of guidelines and poor monitoring. Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in its draft report on the scheme said there was a "flagrant display of financial and administrative indiscipline by the Department of Financial Services (of the...

-The Hindu The hostility to the UPA's food security Bill from both its allies and the Opposition stems not from substantial objections to the draft law itself but from other political grouses The decision to bring an ordinance to provide food security to 67 per cent of the country's population was received with much hostility by the Opposition parties last week. The latter seemed surprised that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) could...