-The Hindu Hyderabad (Telengana): Poonam Malakondaiah, Principal Secretary, Agriculture, Telangana government, has suggested developing 100 model villages in Telangana to promote integrated farming to help small and marginalised farmers. Addressing the World Food Day celebrations at Prof. Jaya Shankar Agricultural University here on Thursday, she said that integrated farming would help farmers to take up dairy farming, fisheries, sericulture and other allied activities along with regular farming to boost their earnings. She suggested...

-Outlook In addition to amending the Rules of the Forest Rights Act, greater attention needs to be paid to changing the Land Acquisition Act   There is no explicit provision in the Forest Rights Act, 2006 for obtaining permission of the Gram Sabha for diversion of forest lands to non-forest purposes. However, Section 4(5) of the Act prevents government to evict any forest dweller unless the recognition process as provided in the...

-The Hindu Business Line   The media have got it wrong on price control reversal Recently, there has been a flutter in various media channels and newspapers as to how the Modi Government has reversed CERTain drug price control measures announced in July 2014. As a result, we are told, prices of these drugs would increase much more than pre-July levels. This was supposed to be a sequel to Modi's visit to the...

-The New Minute We can wash and clean our vegetables plenty of times but that's not the right solution. The solution lies in our regulatory system. Pesticides are everywhere - whether it is their use in our farms or their prevalence in our plates. We have somehow convinced ourselves or have been convinced that if we set CERTain regulatory standards we can conveniently forget about the negative impacts of pesticides and continue...

-The Financial Express What's clear is it has helped few in its current form Activists have come down heavily on rural development minister Nitin Gadkari for attempting to restructure the MGNREGA by, among others, changing the mandatory amount reserved for labour; the number of districts that the scheme is to be used for is also to be reduced to just the needy ones. This has been done, the activists argue, to help...