-The Hindu In all the States belonging to the Hindi heartland, less than one per cent of Hindus eat beef/buffalo meat. The number of Indians eating beef and buffalo meat went up from 7.51 crore in 1999-2000 to 8.35 crore in 2011-12 while the total household consumption of beef/buffalo meat went down from 4.44 crore kg per month to 3.67 crore kg in the same time period. These findings come from National Sample...

-PTI Actress Shabana Azmi today criticised Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis for brokering yesterday's deal between Raj Thackeray and Karan Johar while the Congress demanded his dismissal for aiding "extortion" of the film industry. But emboldened by its success, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena asked traders to "sacrifice" their business with Pakistan for the sake of the "nation", dismissing statements from cotton exporters who said the party's stand would affect the industry. Johar and...

-The Indian Express The opposition’s main contention is that the GM mustard hybrid incorporates three alien genes — barnase, barstar and bar — rendering it inherently unsafe for human and animal health. Fifty years ago, Union Minister for Food and Agriculture Chidambaram Subramaniam took the decision to import 18,000 tonnes of seeds of Lerma Rojo 64A and Sonora 64 wheat from Mexico. The seeds arrived just in time for their planting in...

-Livemint.com No matter which party is ruling, onion farmers will always be the victims of a biased state policy Onion prices have plummeted and onion producers in Maharashtra are in distress. Union minister Nitin Gadkari has appealed to them to diversify their production to avoid a repeat of the situation. Such appeals are unfair. For one, the minister was silent when his government brought down onion prices by restricting exports, and two, thanks...

-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...