-FirstPost.com Travelling across the country for the past five months to bring farmers’ voices to urban audiences through a programme called ‘Smart Agriculture’ - to be broadcast every Saturday and Sunday from 25 July on CNN-IBN - we have learnt that agriculture is not a low-profit activity. In fact, it returns more than double the amount of cash invested. Sandipan Suman, a 47 year-old agricultural sciences graduate and maize grower in Bihar’s...

-Scroll.in Rural landlessness, the strongest indicator of poverty, which afflicts a third of Indians, can be eradicated if the government acted on pending bills and policy recommendations. India’s economy has already crossed $2 trillion and is growing annually at around 6%. But these figures cannot hide the fact that 69% of the population is rural, and 70% of this, or nearly half of all Indians, still depend on land and land-based activities...

-The Indian Express These are the root causes of agricultural distress. Farmers need better irrigation and access to markets. Speaking at the foundation day celebrations of the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) on July 12, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that there were reasons to smile on the economic front as India remains a bright spot, despite the global slowdown. He talked about the 7-8 per cent...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Several members of a joint House panel examining the land acquisition bill today slammed the government for holding "parallel" discussions on the same bill in the Niti Aayog, calling it an "insult to Parliament". Their criticism came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who chaired a meeting of the governing council of the Aayog, warned the Opposition that the deadlock over the bill was "seriously" impacting rural...

-Business Standard This could help bypass central legislation and break the land Bill deadlock Ten big states, most of those ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its alliance partners, on Wednesday sought to unshackle themselves from the logjam over amendments to the contentious land acquisition Bill, 2013, by proposing to bring their own laws for boosting infrastructure development. At a NITI Aayog meeting to discuss the land Bill (the Right to...