-The Economic Times New Delhi: The Agriculture ministry is targeting record foodgrain output of 283.7 million tonnes in the crop year beginning July, with 140.20 million tonnes targeted for the kharif (summer-sown) crop, on expectation of normal rains during the June-September monsoon season. “The weather office forecast of normal monsoon this year is good news for kharif planting and farmers,” Agriculture Minister Radha MoHAn Singh said. He said the government was working...
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In Response to Media Coverage of Crimes Against Minorities, A BJP-Affiliated Think Tank Proposed Guidelines Curtailing Editorial Independence -Kaushal Shroff
-CaravanMagazine.in Crimes against minorities in India, specifically Dalits and Muslims, have risen dramatically since the Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. A reasonable reaction to such hate crimes would have included increasing the allocation of funds to policing machinery at the local and state level. Instead, the Public Policy Research Centre, a BJP-affiliated think tank, had proposed that the state respond by shooting the...
More »NREGA spending up, beneficiaries fewer -Basant Kumar MoHAnty
-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government's spending on the rural job scheme increased 10 per cent in the last fiscal despite a matching decline in the number of beneficiaries because of deletion, challenging claims that weeding out bogus card-holders helped cut down on expenditure and pointing to the lack of jobs in rural areas. After verification, the government struck off the names of 1.62 crore job card-holders under the Mahatma Gandhi National...
More »Between 2015 & 2016, suicide by farmers fell but suicide by agricultural labourers grew
The total number of farm suicides in the country has reduced from 12,602 to 11,370 between 2015 and 2016 viz. a fall by 9.8 percent. This has been revealed recently in a reply by the Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Shri Parshottam Rupala in the Lok Sabha. So, one may wonder why there is such a hue and cry about rural distress and agrarian crisis...
More »Freeing the farm -Ashok Gulati & Shweta Saini
-The Indian Express Raising agricultural exports requires the government to unburden policy of consumer bias. A balance should be struck between meeting the needs of food-insecure consumers and income-insecure farmers. The Agriculture Minister, Radha MoHAn Singh, recently tweeted about the government’s resolve to increase the value of the country’s agricultural exports to $100 billion by 2022-23. The Dalwai Committee Report on doubling farmers’ incomes also talked of a similar target. It said,...
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