-The Hindu Business Line Centre on a mission mode to promote these nutri-cereals New Delhi: The Centre is drawing up an ambitious plan to increase millet production in the country to 45 million tonnes (mt) by 2030 from the current levels of 17 mt, a senior Agriculture Ministry official said on Thursday. “The government would like to promote millets from this year onwards. This year has been declared as year of millets. Over...

-The Hindu Farming must be treated as a market-based enterprise and made viable on its own terms The week-long farmers’ march which reached Mumbai earlier this month, on the anniversary of Gandhi’s Dandi March of 1930, was unprecedented in many ways. It was mostly silent and disciplined, mostly leaderless, non-disruptive and non-violent, and well organised. It received the sympathy of middle class city dwellers, food and water from bystanders, free medical services...

-Livemint.com The only way to solve the farmers’ problem is to make entry to other sectors attractive by creating employment opportunities, and to make it easy to exit farming Farmers have a bad romance with the Indian polity. On the one hand, India loves, even worships, these farmers. On the other, Indian policymakers create the most impossible regulatory environment for the agricultural sector, trapping farmers in a low-income, low-Productivity occupation. The latest...

-Down to Earth Experts say they have already submitted a document to the ICAR about adopting IFS in north-eastern states India needs to adopt a “well designed” integrated farming system (IFS) to realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision to double farmers’ income by 2022, observed the scientists and agricultural experts at the ongoing 105th Indian Science Congress in Manipur today (March 19). “The IFS can enhance farmers’ income if we provide a...

-Livemint.com The National Forest Policy will be an overarching policy for forest management, with the aim of bringing a minimum of one-third of India’s total geographical area under forest or tree cover New Delhi: India’s environment ministry has unveiled a draft of the new National Forest Policy (NFP) that proposes to restrict “schemes and projects which interfere with forests that cover steep slopes, catchments of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, geologically unstable terrain...