-Scroll.in Madhya Pradesh has added garlic to its price deficit payment scheme while Rajasthan has decided to procure the crop. Last year, Bunty Rawal planted garlic on six acres of his land in Khardabad village in Rajasthan’s Kota district. He reckoned it was a good decision. High quality garlic was selling for around Rs 12,000 a quintal at the time, he said. However, he managed to make only around Rs 5,000 as...

-The New Indian Express In an apparent snub to the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, the Bihar government has launched its own scheme to provide guaranteed assistance to the state’s farmers. PATNA: In an apparent snub to the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the Bihar government has launched its own scheme to provide guaranteed assistance to the state’s farmers in the event of crop damage. At a time of growing unrest among...

-The Indian Express Government godowns are, for the first time, bursting at the seams with pulses on record procurement Pune: When in mid-December, Anand Pawar decided to register the standing tur (pigeon-pea) on 10 out of his 50-acre holding with the Maharashtra State cooperative Marketing Federation’s purchase centre at Latur, he was quite hopeful of realising the government’s minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 5,450 per quintal for the soon-to-be-harvested crop. At...

-Hindustan Times Government’s decision is aimed to cut dependence of small and marginal farmers on usurious informal private lenders. The government has streamlined lending norms in schemes such as the Kisan Credit Card to boost institutional credit flow to small and marginal farmers who make up over 90% of people engaged in agriculture and, as a class, are highly vulnerable to risks. The aim is to cut their dependence on usurious...

-The Hindu An estimated 10 million people in nine districts of West Bengal drink arsenic-laden groundwater. Priyanka Pulla finds that despite alarms having been sounded over decades, the State government has moved at a glacial pace to tackle the crisis, while people struggle to cope with the symptoms On a Thursday morning at the government primary school in Madhusudankati, a village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, a gaggle of five-year-olds...