-The Hindu Opposition pARTies must make a new anti-torture legislation pART of their common programme Custodial torture is global, old and stubborn. Dismemberment was a method of torture practised with vigour in ancient India, crushing-by-elephant-foot another. The ARThashastra prescribes mental torture through swear-words with or without physical assaults. Death by a thousand cuts was ancient China’s speciality. The Tang Code (652 CE) describes judicial torture in detail. Ancient Japanese methods of torture...

-The Indian Express Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel in his budget speech announced to lay a new water pipeline project, costing Rs 185 crore, which will help in irrigating 4,500 acres in Dahod district that were not covered under the Kadana-Dahod pipeline.   Gandhinagar: In its Interim Budget for the current financial year, the BJP government on Tuesday announced a slew of schemes and sops for tribal communities especially to improve irrigation...

  The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...

-The Hindu Three out of five farmers in India grow their crops using rainwater, instead of irrigation. However, per hectare government investment into their lands may be 20 times lower, government procurement of their crops is a fraction of major irrigated land crops, and many of the government’s flagship agriculture schemes are not tailored to benefit them. A new rainfed agriculture atlas released this week not only maps the agro biodiversity and...

-Scroll.in Two labourers died of suspected pesticide poisoning in Kuttanad, the state’s rice bowl, in January. On the morning of January 17, KK Sanal Kumar strapped a motorised sprayer onto his back and left for a paddy field near his home in Peringara gram panchayat of Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district. The owners of the field, Unnikrishnan and Sanil, gave him several bottles of the highly hazardous pesticide Viraat to spray on their 40-day-old...