-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government on Friday warned manufacturer, importer and sellers of pre-packaged goods of penalties ranging from fines of up to Rs 1 lakh or prison terms up to a year for repeat offence of not printing the post-GST rates on product labels. The consumer affairs ministry has come out with the new norm for affixing the revised maximum retail price (MRP) on the old stocks,...

-The Hindu "Your job is to take steps to prevent farmers’ suicides and not go around distributing compensation after the suicides", the Supreme Court told the Tamil Nadu government on Friday. The court said the “actual job” of the government is to “directly address the ground reality of farmers suicides”. “Your approach has to be preventive and not compensatory,” a Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and A.M. Khanwilkar told Additional Solicitor General P....

-Livemint.com A cow cess of even Re.1 per litre of petrol will be enough to generate funds that will exceed the entire annual budgets of several Union ministries About two weeks ago, Subramanian Swamy, a Rajya Sabha member from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called for a cow cess of Re1 on petrol to fund gaushalas or cow shelters across the country. Swamy made the comment towards the end of his speech...

-TheWire.in Legislative action that primarily looks at cattle mobility as ‘acts of smuggling cattle out of state for slaughter’ is deeply misguided and betrays a misunderstanding of how India’s cattle have been bought and sold since the British Raj. Like many poorly drafted laws, the recently notified Livestock Markets (Regulation) Rules is so pre-occupied with its self-righteousness that it fails to realise the harm that it would cause. If the colonial era’s...

-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...