-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...

-Scroll.in The Nobel laureate noted that the country does not yet have the jobs essential to sustain the projected growth in demography. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Saturday warned that India may end up with mass unemployment if its manufacturing sector does not grow, News18 reported. The American economist was speaking at an event that the news channel had organised. “As the world’s economies took off because of growth in the manufacturing...

-The Indian Express The government’s projections of milk production almost doubling and incomes of farmers more than trebling by 2023-24 seem rather rosy. It took over one-and-a-half decades for India’s milk production to roughly double from 80.6 million tonnes (mt) in 2000-01 to 163.7 mt in 2016-17. But if the Narendra Modi government’s National Action Plan for Dairy Development: Vision-2022 is to be believed, it’s possible not only to achieve the next...

-The Indian Express Thin Indian babies ‘fatter’ than European babies, greater risk of diabetes: Data Pune: At 28 weeks of pregnancy, Surekha Patil (name changed) from Pabal village in Shirur tehsil of Pune district knows she has to report to the Diabetes Research Centre at KEM hospital in Pune on Tuesday for a glucose tolerance test and a gynaecological evaluation. This is no routine check for 22-year-old Surekha. She has been monitored since...

-The Indian Express Despite deforestation and human encroachment, the country’s forest cover has remained stable around 20% since Independence. This is because the loss of natural old-growth forests is compensated on paper by expanding monoculture plantations. Since Independence, a fifth of India’s land has consistently been under forests. The population has increased more than three times since 1947, and from 1951-80, a total 42,380 sq km of forestland was diverted — some...