-Livemint.com Three questions can help understand whether the budget has enough wherewithal to provide a big rural stimulus New Delhi: The government has given enough signals that the distress-ridden rural sector would receive special focus in the forthcoming Budget. On Monday, a Mint report quoted senior officials in the agriculture ministry saying that there could be a significant increase in budgetary allocations for Crop insurance and irrigation. But in the backdrop...

-Frontline.in Even though the country is in the grip of an unprecedented agrarian crisis and many parts are experiencing severe drought conditions, Union Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Minister Radha Mohan Singh says there is nothing to worry. “The government is fully geared to meet the challenges. All precautionary measures have been taken to help farmers deal with the crisis. They need not fear anything,” he said in a telephonic interview from...

-Hindustan Times The government’s Crop insurance scheme designed to protect 700 million farmers from natural disasters appears to have been overshadowed by Maharashtra’s BJP parliamentarian Gopal Shetty’s alleged description of farmer suicides as a ‘fashion’ and a ‘trend’. Critics have often described the government, which rode to a landslide poll victory in 2014 promising to usher in ‘achhe din’, as ‘pro-corporate’ at the cost of ignoring the farmers. The Narendra Modi-led NDA...

-Livemint.com Spending on irrigation, Crop insurance to be doubled; e-platform to be developed for farm produce New Delhi: The government is set to double annual spending on irrigation and Crop insurance, and develop a national digital platform for farm produce in order to ensure better prices for farmers, as part of a push to reduce rural distress following the first back-to-back drought in India in three decades. “We’re expecting that the new...

-Hindustan Times Bhubaneswar/ Dongargarh: PM Narendra Modi wooed rural India on Sunday, inaugurating a rural-urban or Rurban mission at Dongargarh in Chhattisgarh and exhorting Odisha farmers to sign up for his government’s Crop insurance scheme. The Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Scheme, aimed at improving basic infrastructure, was launched from the Maoist-hit district of Rajnandgaon. “When we talk of smart cities, why can’t we talk of smart villages? The villages in our country...