-The Hindu It is time to make victim impact statements mandatory In Mallikarjun Kodagil (Dead) v. State of Karnataka (2018), the Supreme Court stressed the need to have a victim impact statement “so that an approPRIate punishment is awarded to the convict”. This throws up many issues that are of interest to the victims of crimes. The term victim came to be defined in criminal law only in 2009 in India. The victim...

-Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, December 2018 (WP-2018-026) There are three goals of agricultural development in India. These are: (a) achieving high growth by raising productivity; (b) inclusiveness by focusing on lagging regions, small farmers and women; and (c) sustainability of agriculture. In this paper, we will address two questions: (a) How far India progressed in the three goals of agriculture in recent decades? (b) What are the policies...

-Economic and Political Weekly In the wake of the central government’s minimum support PRIces hike for kharif 2018–19, the state government in Madhya Pradesh implemented a variant of the deficiency payments system called the Bhavantar Bhugtan Yojana for compensating the farmers when market PRIces fell below MSP. Besides the problems of long delays in payments to farmers, large transaction costs that farmers incurred due to multiple registrations, and the disposal of...

-PTI The government has procured 238.8 lakh tonnes of rice in the current 2018-19 marketing season so far, with purchase in Punjab and Haryana almost over, according to official data. The rice procurement target for the current season (October-September) has been fixed at 375 lakh tonnes. In the previous year, total rice procurement stood at 381.8 lakh tonnes. Procurement is undertaken by state-run Food Corporation of India (FCI) and State agencies for the...

-The Hindu NDZ along Kerala coast will be significantly reduced giving room for constructions Kochi: The coastal belt of Kerala is likely to witness a flurry of construction activities which may further deteriorate the quality of the fragile ecosystem. With the notification of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) 2018, the No Development Zone (NDZ) along the Kerala coast will be significantly reduced giving room for constructions for tourism facilities towards the seaward side...