-Centre for Science and Environment * Niti Aayog vice chairperson Rajiv Kumar releases the report, which provides the real picTure of organic farming in India: only 2 per cent of India’s net sown area organically farmed, and a mere 1.3 per cent of farmers registered to do organic farming * Organic and naTural farming must be upscaled to make Indian agriculTure sustainable, says the report * Needs to be Turned into a mass...

-Down to Earth Exceptional growth in agriculTure and acreage in kharif season precipitate a crisis like never before for farmers   In recent times, agriculTure made headlines for all the wrong reasons: Farmers quitting cultivation; the sector Turning into a perennial loss-making enterprise; and the country’s official policy to downsize the dependence on agriculTure to reduce overall economic hardship among the poorest of the population. AgriculTure’s fast-declining economic importance reached such an extent...

-TheWire.in From seeds and machinery to livestock and irrigation, the state needs to change the status quo. One eye must be firmly kept on the fuTure. If Punjab’s agriculTure sector is to succeed, it has to think beyond short-term crises such as the current pandemic-induced one. For instance, the Expert Group headed by Montek Singh Ahluwalia has made important recommendations about seeds, agriculTural research, livestock, dairy and food processing. It has been noted that...

-The Indian Express India GDP Q1 Data: Demand from individual citizens and private businesses plummeted in Q1, increase in government’s demand made up for just 6% of this fall Although most people expected India’s GDP to show substantial contraction when the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) released the data for the first quarter (April, May, June) of the current financial year on Monday, the broad consensus was that the decline...

-Down to Earth The programme can provide a safety net for the poor, not just in COVID-19 times, but for times to come In these darkest days of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) — when jobs and economies have collapsed — 56 million households got work in the past three months and these jobs provided relief. This was under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which perhaps is the...