-The Hindu Business Line Calls for restructuring Nafed for effective procurement of pulses, oilseeds   Bengaluru: The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has made a pitch for encouraging water use efficiency in agriculture. As part of its non-price policy recommendations for kharif 2015-16, the crop advisory body has suggested that States fix quantitative ceilings on per hectare use of both water and electricity. The farm sector accounts for about 83 per cent...

-ABP Live Some days back the death of Surjit Singh, who had met Rahul Gandhi a few days before he committed suicide, once again brought the focus on the tragic but unresolved issue of farmer suicides. A few days after Surjit Singh consumed sulphos tablets, another 36-year-old farmer, Baljinder Das Bairagi from Sangrur, hanged himself from a ceiling fan. He carried an outstanding loan of Rs 7-lakh. A survey done by three...

-IPS News TIKAMGARH: Eighty-year-old Chenabai Kushwaha sits on a charpoy under a neem tree in the village of Chitawar, located in the Tikamgarh district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, staring intently at a dictaphone. “Please sing a song for us,” urges the woman holding the voice recorder. Kushwaha obliges with a melancholy tune about an eight-year-old girl begging her father not to give her away in marriage. The melody melts...

-Business Standard Expected delay in harvesting might keep commodities elevated for a month Mumbai: While the wholesale price index (WPI) might have turned negative primarily due to a steep decline in the prices of non-food articles, rising vegetable prices kept food articles firm in May. While drumstick prices showed a sharp rise of 130 per cent, articles of mass consumption such as brinjal, cabbage, bitter gourd and cauliflower recorded an upswing of 50...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...