-The Hindu Business Line Acreage under oilseeds, paddy and other rabi crops gains Wheat acreage in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest producer of winter-grown cereal, has jumped 36 per cent to 75.91 lakh hectares (lh) as of Friday from 55.82 lh a year ago. This has, in turn, resulted in the country’s overall sowing of all crops registering a 15 per cent growth in the ongoing rabi season so far. As of December...

-The Hindu Prevalence of anaemia among men in rural areas was lowest in the southern States (18.5%) and highest in the eastern region (34.1%) While anaemia among adolescent girls and boys, and women, particularly those of reproductive age has been studied extensively, anaemia in men has been largely ignored. In 2019, a paper published in  The Lancet Global Health highlighted that nearly one in four men (23.2%) in the age group 15-54...

-The Telegraph Centre said it had conveyed its stand on the points raised by the two-judge bench to the secretary-general of the apex court in a letter dated July 11, 2017, but had not received any response New Delhi: The Centre has sought to blame the delays in judges’ appointments, for which the Supreme Court has repeatedly reprimanded it, on the collegium itself. The government invoked observations by a two-judge bench in 2017...

-The Hindu This is the first time that a Central ministry has endorsed the safety and benefits of the seed in Parliament Field trials of the transgenic mustard variety, DMH-11, revealed them to be higher yielding and they didn’t deter the pollination habits of honey bees, Union science minister Jitendra Singh said in Rajya Sabha in a written response to a query. Dhara Mustard Hybrid-11 (DMH-11) had recently been approved by the Genetic...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...