-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The increase in farm land holdings, a consistent trend since the 1970s, has been slowing down in the past 20 years but there is a rise in the number of female land holders, a possible indicator of higher involvement in farm activities, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16, has revealed. The trend could mean the association of farming with “kisan bhai (farmer brothers)” might be less exclusively...

-The Hindu Business Line 2.45 million has been lost to urban sprawl between 2010-11 and 2015-16, says survey New Delhi: In an indication of further deepening of a crisis in the agricutural sector, the average size of operational agricultural holdings in the country has declined to 1.08 hectares (ha) in 2015-16 as compared to 1.15 ha in 2010-11, according to the freshly- released provisional agriculture census data released on Monday. Expectedly, the number...

-The Indian Express Much before the Supreme Court started hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the Constitutional validity of Aadhaar and much before the unique identity number roiled a nation over concerns of privacy, Nandurbar had made peace with the 12-digit identification number. Since the launch of the unique ID in this Maharashtra district, the 12-digit identity has been inextricably tied to people’s lives — from a mother without Aadhaar who was...

-The Hindu Budgetary support must be strengthened to make Ayushman Bharat a success Ayushman Bharat has been rolled out as a health protection scheme that will provide guaranteed access to treatment that is free at the point of delivery to about 40% of the population selected on the basis of censused socio-economic indicators. It is the essential first step on the road to universal health coverage, although it has been launched by...