-The Economic Times The Food Security Act would encourage below poverty line women to have more children, defeating the government's population-control efforts, says one of the 1.6 lakh opinions the standing committee on food and consumer affairs has received. The suggestion, hence, is to remove pregnant women from the list of beneficiaries of the food security bill. This is not the only shocking suggestion. Another suggestion is to avoid nutritional protection to...

-Outlook Could scientists have got the impacts of climate change on food supply wildly wrong? I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in the northern hemisphere by ferocious weather. In the US, Russia...

-The Times of India The government is set to step up its push for cash transfer of subsidies and adopt it as a policy doctrine in the run-up to elections, with two pilot projects validating the assumption that it would lead to significant savings for the government while enhancing benefits for users. A pilot project for cooking gas in Mysore run by state-run oil companies saw the number of connections dropping 40%...

-The Hindu Crops destroyed due to waterlogging; khap panchayat bans paddy cultivation “Our village is unique: here people do not pray for rains but for a drought,” quipped Krishen Kumar, a farmer of Mundahera village of Jhajjar, as he showed how a rise in the water level in his village and adjoining areas has led to waterlogging and destruction of standing crops in his village. While after the construction of the Jawaharlal Nehru...

-The Economic Times With reports of groundwater level going down in Punjab and Haryana, considered the rice bowl of India, scientists and analysts suggest its cultivation be shifted to eastern states which have better water resources. They say Punjab and Haryana should focus on basmati rice, which is largely exported, and the eastern states should produce non-basmati varieties for meeting the domestic demand. Talking to ET, Dr Swapan Kumar Dutta, deputy director general...