-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government today conceded there were shortcomings in the Prime Minister Crop Insurance scheme and asked states to set up their own insurance companies to prevent "malpractices" by private firms. Speaking during a five-hour debate on the agrarian crisis in the Lok Sabha late on Wednesday night, agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said: "There are shortcomings in the implementation although the modified scheme is very good. We are...

-The Hindu "Your job is to take steps to prevent farmers’ suicides and not go around distributing compensation after the suicides", the Supreme Court told the Tamil Nadu government on Friday. The court said the “actual job” of the government is to “directly address the ground reality of farmers suicides”. “Your approach has to be preventive and not compensatory,” a Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and A.M. Khanwilkar told Additional Solicitor General P....

-The Pioneer Centre must come up with a national policy The Supreme Court’s intervention for the lack of a national policy to help calamity-hit farmers is welcome. Regardless of what we have at the moment for them, the country's bread-earners must be offered all possible support to strengthen the economy. While taking up a number of public interest litigations, the apex court found that the Government had no policy to tackle the...

-PTI New Delhi: "We do not want politics to shift to the courts," the Supreme Court observed on Thursday while hearing arguments on whether a political party can file and pursue a public interest litigation (PIL). "The apprehension is that this will shift politics to the courts. We do not want this. We do not want politics to shift to the courts," a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and N V...

-Business Standard The efficacy of farm debt waivers is ambiguous, but it has proved to be a potent potent weapon in the run-up to elections With elections round the corner in agrarian states of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, his party’s Punjab chief ministerial candidate Amarinder Singh and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal are trying to woo farmers of the two states with promises of farm...