-The Indian Express Arrivals of cows, bulls, calves also down, to 452 from over 4,000 four years ago; IG says no complaints of smuggling. Pushkar: The famous cattle fair at Pushkar held earlier this month saw a drop in cow sales by 94 per cent over the past two years. The number of cows brought to the fair, an important event on the cattle trade calendar for its immense tourism value, saw...

-The Hindu Cyclonic storms on Tamil Nadu’s 1,076-km coastline are not unusual, and at least once in two years there is some disaster or the other. The common thread running through every such instance is that all claims of preparedness are invariably exposed as either hollow or woefully inadequate. The focus, as well as any claim to administrative efficiency, is solely on rescue and relief operations. What the government is able...

-The Tribune To ensure stable prices of pulses and attractive returns for producers, policies of domestic prices and tariffs should blend. Import duties must be calibrated with demand. As the Indian economy grows at a rate of 7 per cent plus, assuming low growth as an aberration, the food basket will diversify. Within grains, the movement will be to pulses as shown by the  expert group on pulse production. The yield and...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Outlook Onion prices at Lasalgaon in Maharashtra, Asia's biggest wholesale market for the staple, have started rising again due to supply concerns as the old stock has been exhausted, while the fresh kharif crop this year is expected to be 25-30 per cent lower. Onion price, which had touched the record Rs 57 per kg in August at Lasalgoan, showed a declining trend after the Centre took several steps including hike in...