The government should immediately announce a 10% increase in the floor price of cotton and rice to protect farmer incomes if it imposes a ban on the export of these commodities, India's two most economically significant cash crops, according to the Commission of Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), a body which advises the government on the pricing policy for major farm produce. "Any ban on export is an implicit tax on...

The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate on Tuesday declared that the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team had not found any evidence for prosecuting Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and top bureaucrats and police officers and recommended that the investigation in the 2002 Gulberg Society massacre case be closed. Though magistrate M.S. Bhatt did not pronounce the court's decision on the closure report, he ordered the SIT to give a copy of it, within...

-PTI The Agriculture Ministry is likely to revise upwards the country's cotton production estimate by 3.5 per cent to a record 35.2 million bales for the current marketing year, a government official said.  The ministry releases four advance estimates at different stages of crop growth. In its second advance estimate, cotton production was pegged at 34 million bales for the ongoing 2011-12 marketing year ending September.  "The cotton production has slightly improved and...

The northern region of Gujarat State in western India is semi-arid and prone to droughts, receiving almost all of its rain during the monsoon season between June and September. But for the past three decades, many crop and dairy farms have remained green—even during the dry season. That's because farmers have invested in wells and pumps, using massive amounts of electricity to extract water from deep aquifers. The government has artificially propped...

Less than two in 10 women in India received medical attention by a qualified professional in 2010 while delivering at home. Contrary to popular belief, fewer women in urban India received medical attention while delivering at home than rural India - 10.8% against 16.2%. Nearly 1 in 4 births overall were attended by "untrained functionaries" - varying from as high as 53.5% in Jharkhand to as low as 0.2% in...