After failing to come anywhere near the 10th Five Year Plan (2002-07) target of 4 per cent per annum rate of growth of agricultural output, the Planning Commission has projected a lower target growth rate of 3 to 3.5 per cent per annum for the 11th Plan period. While some may view this as a more modest target, others may consider it as still far too ambitious, given the track...

Genetic approval committee rejects transgenic groundnut INDIA’S Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has rejected a request by University of Agricultural Sciences in Bengaluru to conduct trials on transgenic groundnuts for commercial development in difficult terrain. The university wanted to conduct trials for drought and salt tolerance. GEAC noted that transgenic groundnut expresses transcription factors— proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences—namely DREB2A, DREB1A, DREB1B and PDH45, to improve its stress tolerance. DREB2A...

The government owes crores of rupees to workers under its flagship rural jobs scheme as wages for April and May, even though payment is not supposed to be delayed by more than a fortnight. Wage payments of Rs283 crore are due for the first two months of the ongoing fiscal under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, according to data available with the rural development ministry, which oversees the...

It isn't too much of a stretch to say that India is made up of many nations. A comparison of state-level and country-level data from the newly released multi-dimensional poverty index shows that while Kerala and Goa are at a similar level of development as 'middle-income countries' like Indonesia, Jharkhand and Bihar are similar to 'least-developed countries' like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Earlier this month, the new MPI measure...

Crops are grown outside our towns. Anger over food prices grows in our towns. Put these two facts together, and you can figure out exactly how divorced, sometimes, the justifiable concern about food inflation is from the cold realities of agriculture. It is not as if we can really blame ourselves for blindness, either; the unreformed, statist nature of price discovery in agriculture insulates us, as in no other sector,...