-The Times of India PATIALA: When smoke from burning paddy stubble was choking Delhi last year, one small village near Nabha in Punjab was doing its bit to keep the air clean. Not a straw was burnt in Kalar Majra, where 60 families farm about 700 acres. “The government chose our village as a model, and gave all the machinery needed to manage the crop residue,” says Bir Dalvinder Singh, a Kalar...

-Down to Earth Farmers struggle to decompose paddy straw in absence of adequate machines It is 11:30 am. A gypsy, with two loudspeakers mounted on it, takes a U-turn (on NH 7 at Chano) and enters Kalajhar village in Sangrur district of Punjab. As it enters, it starts announcing to the farmers in the village to gather at the outskirts and set the crop residue on fire. Such announcement is a sharp...

-The Telegraph March sought equality for farm workers New Delhi: A band of bold women is outing alleged predators in newsrooms in the country while another group of women is hitting the streets to bar their gender from the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. In the middle of the twin turmoil and away from the limelight, as many as 25,000 people from the election-bound heartland had last week set out on a long march...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: India has informed the World Trade Organization (WTO) that its proposed national agriculture export policy would be consistent with global trade rules. In a meeting held last week to review farm policies of various countries, India’s proposed policy drew attention owing to concerns over its potential impact on global markets. The policy aims to do away with restrictions such as minimum export prices or outright bans as...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...