-The Hindu Business Line ‘Development not at the cost of food security’ After several farmers’ organisations, it is now the turn of agricultural scientists, representing various research institutions, to criticise the Land Acquisition Bill. On Monday, senior agricultural scientists told the joint Parliamentary panel, looking into the amendments to the 2013 legislation, that reducing cultivable land can pose a serious threat to the food security of the country. Representatives, including Vice-Chancellors of the Indian...

-Hindustan Times London: There are 1.6 billion people living in multidimensional poverty across the world and nearly 440 million of them are in eight large Indian states, according to a new analysis using a unique index developed at the University of Oxford.   The eight Indian states that have similar number of poor as in 25 African countries are Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan and West Bengal. The poorest...

-Down to Earth According to a UNICEF report, despite achievements, millions of children live in poverty and die before the age of five, miss schooling and suffer from chronic malnutrition The 11th edition of Progress for Children: Beyond Averages, a UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) report card on child-related Millenium Development Goal (MDG), warns that the focus must be on disadvantaged children, who continue to face unequal opportunities across the...

-The Hindu Suicides decrease with increasing farm size and yield, but increase with the area under Bt Cotton’. The cultivation of Bt cotton, a genetically modified, insect-resistant cotton variety, is a risky affair for Indian farmers practising rain-fed agriculture, according to a latest study published by California-based agricultural scientists in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. Annual suicide rates of farmers in rain-fed areas are directly related to increase in Bt cotton adoption, say...

-The Hindu Business Line Not the RBI, going by the revised priority sector lending norms, which will further reduce credit to the marginalised Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often expressed his sense of anguish at the plight of farmers. In a recent statement in the Lok Sabha, he noted that the agriculture community’s problems were “old, deep-rooted and widespread”, and stated that farmers cannot be left to fend for themselves. Implicit in that...