-The Economic Times With the general election a few months away, the central government has begun crunching the numbers in preparation for a comprehensive programme to help farmers tide over challenges posed by a dip in prices and dwindling incomes. The government is keen on a more substantive intervention than a loan waiver at the central level to alleviate agrarian distress besides stepping up investments in the sector, having concluded that writing...

-Scroll.in The former Planning Commission member explains why the country needs to tread carefully on this idea. On January 1, when Indian news agency ANI asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the government’s plans to reduce agrarian distress, he said loan waivers do not work as a very small segment of farmers take loans from banks. “A majority of them take loans from money lenders,” said Modi. “When governments make such announcements,...

-Economic and Political Weekly The union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare had prescribed a model Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act in 2003. The state-level adoption of the act has been tardy and varied in terms of both the magnitude and content of agricultural market reforms. Yet, the ministry under the current central government has come up with another model act, the Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion and Facilitation) Act,...

-The Hindu Cleaner stretches recorded across all riverine States New Delhi: The water quality of the Ganga in 2018 has “improved over last year”, according to a written statement in the Rajya Sabha on Monday by junior Water Resources Minister Satyapal Singh. The statement said “dissolved oxygen” levels had improved at 39 locations, and “biological oxygen demand” (BOD) levels and faecal coliform had decreased at 42 and 47 locations respectively. These three parameters...

-The Hindu The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will record biometric data including the fingerprints and iris scans of about 30 lakh applicants who have sought to be included in the National Register of Citizens (NRC) after having been excluded from the final draft published last year. Almost 30 lakh out of the 40 lakh people who found their names missing from the NRC had filed claims to be included during...