-The Indian Express Between September and December, when retail onion prices soared from around Rs 30 to Rs 100-plus per kg (they have since fallen to Rs 50 or so), Paswan has similarly urged state governments through Twitter to “act” against alleged hoarders of the bulb. On January 7, Union Consumer Affairs minister Ram Vilas Paswan took to Twitter, to issue a stern warning to “hoarders”, whom he blamed for “creating artificial...

-Down to Earth Without empowering women in farming by recognising them as farmers and giving them land rights, agriculture can’t be sustained and so can’t the economy In Maharashtra’s 2019 Assembly elections, the Vidarbha constituencies presented interesting trends. The region is important politically not just for the stalwarts who contest from there, but also for the development issues it represents. More than three lakh farmers have committed suicide in India between 1991 and...

-The Hindu The AAP will hope that the Assembly polls are a referendum on its government’s work Delhi, the Union Territory (UT) that hosts India’s capital city, might lag behind several States in total population and in area, but it enjoys outsize significance in terms of media and political attention. With 1.47 crore electors spread across the largely metropolitan national capital region and its pockets of rural voters in some suburbs, Delhi...

-The Indian Express Does away with need for village revenue officer’s signature; guards against crop insurance fraud. Pune: Early in December, when Bhagwan Ingole, a farmer from Malegaon in Ardhrapur taluka of Nanded went to the Citizen Facilitation Centre in his village to insure his one acre of rabi chana (bengal gram) crop, he was in for a surprise. During the previous seasons, the operator of this one-stop shop catering to most...

-The New Indian Express The Survey of India plans to use drones to create a high-resolution map of every inch of India. It comes with unprecedented privacy and security challenges The Survey of India (SoI) has embarked upon an ambitious project of using drone imaging to create an ultra-high resolution spatial and topographic map of India. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, calls it the biggest endeavour in Indian...