-Livemint.com Payment to cane growers is considered ‘due’ when it is delayed by more than 14 days after supplying raw cane to a mill New Delhi: Following higher sugar production and plummeting wholesale prices, dues to sugarcane farmers from mills are piling up, shows latest numbers. According to the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA), till January end, sugar mills across various States owed farmers Rs13,932 crore. Payment to cane growers is considered ‘due’...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between States. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...

-Hindustan Times A newer generation of politicians has again voiced the demand of giving land to landless Dalit households as a means to resolve the crisis of rural livelihoods. But the relentless pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies and liberalisation has rendered most of these demands Utopian Seven decades after Independence, while a majority of farmers cultivate their own land (however small their holdings may be), most Dalit farmers in much of India...

-The Hindu Doctors say there ought to be an audit of C-section deliveries in private and public health facilities In its new guidelines, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for the elimination of the so-called ‘one-centimetre-per-hour’ benchmark — a rule of thumb that obstetricians use to determine whether a delivery requires surgical intervention. This is to counter what the body calls a “surge” in interventions such as caesarean sections that could...

-The Times of India BENGALURU: Among other things that emerged in the aftermath of the massive Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam is the active role of employees of the Public Sector Banks (PSBs) in multiple frauds over the years. TOI has accessed Reserve Bank of India data that reveals the number of cases involving staff across various States and the amount of loss reported. Overall, data from April 2013 to June 2016...