-The Indian Express The state’s agriculture department has also sent a request to the Union Ministry of Agriculture to send them an immediate grant of Rs 1602 crore while the whole project is of Rs 11,000 crore. Ludhiana: WHEN almost 85 per cent of paddy in the area has been harvested already, the state Department of Agriculture is hurriedly conducting workshops on straw management across the state. The state’s agriculture department...

-The Hindu In all the States belonging to the Hindi heartland, less than one per cent of Hindus eat beef/buffalo meat. The number of Indians eating beef and buffalo meat went up from 7.51 crore in 1999-2000 to 8.35 crore in 2011-12 while the total household consumption of beef/buffalo meat went down from 4.44 crore kg per month to 3.67 crore kg in the same time period. These findings come from National Sample...

-The Hindu CHENNAI: There will be no change in the government’s policy of universal public distribution system. Shedding its three-year-long reservations over the National Food Security Act (NFSA), the Tamil Nadu government on Thursday announced that it would implement the Act, effective November 1. There will be no change in the government’s policy of universal public distribution system. Also, the scheme of free distribution of rice to about 1.92 crore rice-drawing family (RATion) cards...

-The Indian Express Paddy growers in the poll-bound state suffer huge losses from unanticipated insect pest attack. Jalandhar: For Punjab’s farmers, fortune always seems to smile on the other side. Last year, it was the whitefly sucking pest that ravaged their cotton crop. This time round, it’s the brown plant hopper (BPH) that has caused significant yield and price realisation losses for paddy grown in large swathes of the state. And there...

-The Hindu Business Line The NITI Aayog should revive district-level planning in order to implement the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution While the Planning Commission, which was virtually an executive arm of the Union government, stands abolished, the District Planning Committee (DPC), a constitutional institution mandated “to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole” with a focus on resource endowments, environmental conservation, infrastructural development and spatial...