-The Indian Express The picture is completed by the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (crop insurance) and e-market platform that he is going to launch on April 14. For the last two months, the Narendra Modi government seems to have gone into an overdrive to appease farmers. Several farmer rallies have been organised and the common theme has been the PM’s “dream” to double the incomes of farmers by 2022. According to...

-Hindustan Times It is good to see Harsh Vardhan, Union minister for science and technology, apprising members of the Lok Sabha on adulterated milk, which has become a part of our diet. However, like many previous mentions of the issue, this one also missed the point: Contamination due to management practices. While efforts are put into testing milk available in the market, we often forget the cows and buffaloes, which are the...

-The Hindu Business Line In 2015, vegetable, milk and cereal inflation was higher than all-India average   While food prices rose at a slower pace across India in 2015, the poor in the South and certain other parts of the country saw no respite and had to continue spending more for a decent meal. Manipur, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Jammu & Kashmir faced higher food inflation in 2015 compared with 2014,...

-The Indian Express We need to make goat farming organised, tie it to agriculture and animal husbandry. This is an apocryphal story, but it is bizarre enough to be true. Once every four or five years, we have a livestock census. The latest one is the 19th, for 2012. This anecdote is about the 2007 version. In a village in West Bengal, there were 31 geese — 17 male, 14 female. An...

-The Indian Express Never before has India’s agricultural science community been as demoralised as now Everyone knows Indian agriculture is in deep crisis, impacting around 115 million farmers and an equal number of landless cultivators. Two consecutive bad monsoons and falling commodity prices have resulted in the imports of edible oils and pulses touching all-time-highs, even as its exports of agri-products — from basmati rice, soya meal, sugar, milk powder and...