-IANS All the sweet shops across the state went on a 24-hour strike Kolkata: In what could be a bitter experience for the sweet-loving residents of West Bengal, over two lakh sweet shops, celebrated for their rosogollas and mishti doi, across the state went on a 24-hour strike on Monday to protest imposition of five per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST). Monday's protest is expected to cause an estimated loss of Rs...

-The Indian Express The failure of populist rural credit schemes stems primarily from poor understanding of farm indebtedness in the first place. From the 1970s, a lot of private investment in tube-well irrigation, farm mechanisation and allied agricultural activities took place with bank credit support. After the establishment of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in 1982, institutional credit flows not only accelerated, but also exhibited diversification to fund livestock...

-The Indian Express They are on the roads and in the fields. Farmers are worried, as are MLAs. 13 years after its anti-cow slaughter Act, Madhya Pradesh struggles with stray cows Nestled along a rocky hillock in Tikamgarh, this small village of about a thousand residents follows a fixed ritual at twilight. Before retiring for the day, the men of Dumbar herd cows wandering in the village’s lanes into a makeshift enclosure,...

-Livemint.com Unlike the dhoti-clad, topi-wearing quintessential ‘kisan’, the new Indian farmer is vocal and tech-savvy New Delhi: In the winter of 1988 when the feisty farmer leader from Uttar Pradesh, Mahendra Singh Tikait, laid siege to Delhi with thousands of cultivators and their cattle literally creating a mess of the boat club lawns, agriculture’s share in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) was about 30%. About three decades later, the farm sector’s share in...

-The Telegraph Lucknow: Implementation of the crop loan waiver that Yogi Adityanath's government had announced on April 4 faces a fresh threat of delay, this time because of poor Internet connectivity in the border regions. Adityanath had on Friday asked district administrations to collect the loan data from the banks and upload them on their websites by July 31 and then start handing out the waiver certificates. But hundreds of bank branches have...