-The Hindu Business Line Finance Minister meets bankers to set targets To promote very small businesses, the Centre aims to facilitate credit up to ₹1 lakh crore under the MUDRA scheme in the current fiscal. According to a senior government official, the credit facility issue was discussed at a meeting between the Finance Minister and bankers recently. It was proposed that for the current fiscal, the target under ‘Shishu’ category would be ₹40,000 crore,...

-The Hindu Introduction of millets through PDS will improve health conditions, says academic SANGAREDDY (Telengana): Are the dietary changes taking place in the country resulting in double burden of both under and over nutrition despite improved economic conditions in the past 20 years? This issue is the gist of a study conducted by the International Crops Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). The study was conducted in 487 households in eight villages...

-The Hindu Suicides decrease with increasing farm size and yield, but increase with the area under Bt Cotton’. The cultivation of Bt cotton, a genetically modified, insect-resistant cotton variety, is a risky affair for Indian farmers practising rain-fed agriculture, according to a latest study published by California-based agricultural scientists in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. Annual suicide rates of farmers in rain-fed areas are directly related to increase in Bt cotton adoption, say...

-The Hindu Business Line Not the RBI, going by the revised priority sector lending norms, which will further reduce credit to the marginalised Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often expressed his sense of anguish at the plight of farmers. In a recent statement in the Lok Sabha, he noted that the agriculture community’s problems were “old, deep-rooted and widespread”, and stated that farmers cannot be left to fend for themselves. Implicit in that...

-The Hindu Business Line Instructional videos made by, and for the agricultural community Treatment of paddy seeds and scientific application of fungicide in Odisha, the creation of an ‘Azolla’ mother pit in Andhra Pradesh, insights into mint cultivation in Uttar Pradesh, and natural remedies for diarrhoea in cattle in Karnataka. You learn about all these and more from the nearly 4,000 videos produced by Digital Green, a seven-year-old development venture that is...