-The Indian Express The result in the Kairana Lok Sabha seat bypoll, where ganna payment was the main issue, brought forth a crisis born of advances in plant breeding and boost in sugarcane production. Not many would have heard of Bakshi Ram. Currently director of the Sugarcane Breeding Institute (SBI) at Coimbatore, he isn’t as well-known as Norman Borlaug or M S Swaminathan. Yet, the wonder sugarcane variety, Co-0238, bred by...

-Hindkisan.com “This amendment is an insult to people who fought hard to secure progressive provisions in the LARR 2013, it weaken people’s power to challenge illegal and unjust forced acquisition of land, and empowers the state and corporations to infringe upon people’s rights over natural resources” read the statement. Various civil society organisations have come together to oppose the recent President’s assent granted to the amendments made in the Andhra Pradesh Land...

-The Indian Express Government godowns are, for the first time, bursting at the seams with pulses on record procurement Pune: When in mid-December, Anand Pawar decided to register the standing tur (pigeon-pea) on 10 out of his 50-acre holding with the Maharashtra State Cooperative Marketing Federation’s purchase centre at Latur, he was quite hopeful of realising the government’s minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 5,450 per quintal for the soon-to-be-harvested crop. At...

The country’s agrarian sector in the last financial year expanded at almost half the rate at which it grew in 2016-17, shows the recently released provisional estimates by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). As compared to a growth rate of 6.3 percent witnessed in 2016-17, the growth rate in real Gross Value Added (GVA) by the agrarian sector (i.e., increase in agricultural GVA after neutralizing the effect of price inflation)...

-The Times of India THRISSUR: The state government has raised objection to the move of a man in Palakkad to get intellectual property (IP) rights over the Navara variety of rice. Agriculture minister V S Sunilkumar said as per the information received by the government, this person had applied for IP rights under the Farmers’ right clause of the Protection of Plant Variety and Farmers Right Act, 2001 (PPV&FR Act). “He is known...