-The Indian Express Sukhdev Singh Kokari Kalan, general secretary of BKU (Ugrahan), said that Captain Amarinder Singh had not fulfilled his promise and the policies he is bringing in the budget is ‘suicidal’ for the farmers. Jalandhar: The farming community, which is under acute depression due to long goining agrarian crisis, were left disappointed as the Congress government in Punjab announced its second budget Saturday. Experts and farmers of Punjab have...

-Business Standard In absolute numbers, farmer suicides in Haryana and Punjab were less than in Maharashtra, which continued to be Number-1 Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Karnataka, which have large tracts under irrigation and have maintained high agricultural production levels, saw a surge in farmer suicides during 2016, as compared to 2015, provisional data showed. This contrasts with the traditional suicide hotbeds of Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh — they saw a fall...

-Livemint.com The only way to solve the farmers’ problem is to make entry to other sectors attractive by creating employment opportunities, and to make it easy to exit farming Farmers have a bad romance with the Indian polity. On the one hand, India loves, even worships, these farmers. On the other, Indian policymakers create the most impossible regulatory environment for the agricultural sector, trapping farmers in a low-income, low-productivity occupation. The latest...

-PTI The Punjab government had earlier faced the wrath of the tribunal for not taking effective steps to provide financial assistance and infrastructure facility to the farmers to encourage them not to burn agricultural residue. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Tuesday directed Delhi and four northern states to formulate a comprehensive policy for providing incentives and infrastructural assistance to farmers to stop them from burning crop residue to prevent air pollution. The...

-Down to Earth What is the use of strategy when no special budget was allocated to double farmers’ income, says a senior NITI Aayog official anonymously In a two-day closed door meeting on doubling farmers’ income, the government claimed that there is no lack of funds to implement a seven-point strategy devised to double farmers’ income by 2022. The national conference, Agriculture 2022 - Doubling Farmers’ Income, which ends today, hosts sessions...