The parliamentary panel on food and agriculture has recommended against sugar decontrol, claiming the move will go against the interest of farmers as well as consumers. The views of this panel, expressed in a report tabled in the Parliament yesterday, are not binding. “The committee is of the opinion that if the entire control on manufacturing and distribution of sugar is removed, the PDS scheme will be adversely affected, as sugar...

The parliamentary panel on food and agriculture has recommended against sugar decontrol, claiming the move will go against the interest of farmers as well as consumers. The views of this panel, expressed in a report tabled in the Parliament yesterday, are not binding. “The committee is of the opinion that if the entire control on manufacturing and distribution of sugar is removed, the PDS scheme will be adversely affected, as sugar...

A 32-year-old sharecropper hanged himself in Ausgram's Purbachati village on Wednesday morning, the third suicide in the drought-ridden region in less than two weeks. The news spread like wildfire through the scorched fields when, just 5km away, Trinamool Congress leaders Partha Chatterjee and Sisir Adhikary were consoling the families of the earlier two victims, Jitu Bagdi and Yunus Seikh. Gosai Patra quietly walked out of home at dawn and hanged...

There’s suddenly a flurry of activity in Karotia, a nondescript village in West Bengal’s Burdwan district. Lately, a lot of politicians and state government officials have been visiting the village, and they say work on a nearly forgotten 14km irrigation canal is going to start soon. It’s been nearly 36 years since the state government first proposed to dig the canal, recalls Azizur Haque, the local panchayat chief. It was to...

A farmer committed suicide in Burdwan today, apparently driven by drought, debt and the anxiety of bringing up a daughter born four days ago. Gosain Patra, 32, is the third farmer from Burdwan’s Ausgram to have committed suicide this year. Gosain, a resident of Purbatotipara village, hanged himself from a tree this morning. The farmer’s family members said he had managed to cultivate only half of his two-and-a-half bigha land because of...