-Mail Today "We do not wish to risk upsetting farmers just ahead of the polls," the Punjab agriculture department officials said. Punjab has pleaded helplessness on the farm fire menace clearly citing the impending Assembly elections in March-April 2017. Members of the Supreme Court-appointed Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) told Mail Today that at two recent meetings, Punjab agriculture department officials prayed they may be excused from fining farmers for burning paddy...

-The Asian Age As a neutral observer, I have no hesitation in saying that at this moment there is hardly any political party which could pose a political challenge to the BJP at the national level, but that doesn’t mean that there are no alarm bells for the BJP. The party, which swept not only the 2014 Lok Sabha elections but also most of the Assembly elections held after that, may...

-Business Standard The efficacy of farm debt waivers is ambiguous, but it has proved to be a potent potent weapon in the run-up to elections With elections round the corner in agrarian states of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, his party’s Punjab chief ministerial candidate Amarinder Singh and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal are trying to woo farmers of the two states with promises of farm...

-The Telegraph Arun Jaitley today drew loud cheers from the fiscal conservatives as he displayed "prudence" and stuck to the fiscal deficit - which captures the government's borrowing requirements - target of 3.9 per cent of the GDP for 2015-16 and pegged it at 3.5 per cent of the GDP for 2016-17. As the achievement came despite all the problems that the Indian economy faced - the Economic Survey presented details of...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A home ministry helpline offering information on quake-hit Nepal has been swamped by Indian farmers airing their distress, embarrassing a government already under the Opposition's cosh for its "anti-farmer" policies. Compounding the discomfiture, most of the callers are demanding the Rs 15 lakh that Narendra Modi had, during last year's election campaign, promised to deposit in every bank account after retrieving black money from abroad, ministry officials said. "We...