-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...

-The Economic Times 'Bharat' is not going to be 'swachh' anytime soon despite the ambitious programme launched by the Narendra Modi government to clean the country. Next year India will send its second rocket to the Moon but when it comes to pollution, India is alarmingly filthy even by the standards of poor countries, writes The Economist magazine. India's air and water are heavily polluted causing not only a large number of...

-Newsclick.in Food grain availability for Indians has increased by just 3.3% since 1961. On this 72nd Independence Day of our India, while there will be the usual speeches and festivities, spare a thought to this shocking bit of news: average availability of food grains for every Indian has increased by 3.3% since 1961. Food grains includes wheat, rice, other cereals and pulses. Among these, per person availability of pulses has actually declined...

-The Indian Express Raising agricultural exports requires the government to unburden policy of consumer bias. A balance should be struck between meeting the needs of food-insecure consumers and income-insecure farmers. The Agriculture Minister, Radha Mohan Singh, recently tweeted about the government’s resolve to increase the value of the country’s agricultural exports to $100 billion by 2022-23. The Dalwai Committee Report on doubling farmers’ incomes also talked of a similar target. It said,...

-The Financial Express How about planting bamboo extensively along the banks of the Yamuna to sequester the carbon from Delhi’s vehicle emissions? According to the World Bank, India’s per person emission of carbon dioxide was 1,730 kg a year in 2014. Another website says this has risen to 1,900 kg in 2016. Bharathi Namby, a scientist, says it will take just five bamboo plants a year to make an Indian carbon-neutral,...