-The Times of India   The frustration of Vidarbha farmers was brought to the state government's notice in a bizarre incident on Sunday. A distressed farmer drank poison in front of the chief minister and thousands of agriculturists at a public meeting in AMRavati district on Sunday. Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan was addressing a municipal poll campaign meeting in Dhamangaon Railway taluka of AMRavati. Soon after he began his speech, farmer Arun Sabhane...

The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Union government to expedite the release and deportation of all Pakistani and other nationals lodged in various prisons in the country. A Bench of Justices R.M. Lodha and H.L. Gokhale told Additional Solicitor-General Parag Tripathi that there was no justification for keeping them in prisons. The Bench passed the order on a writ petition filed by Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party chief Bhim Singh,...

The failure of timely intervention by the state government as regards the woes of cotton growers of Vidarbha seems to have only added to the agrarian crisis. The suicide by six more cotton growers of the region in the last 72 hours paints a grim picture of the correlation between the government’s inaction and distressed farmers driven to take the extreme step.   Reports reaching here on Thursday said that among the...

-The Economic Times   With the entry of foreign supermarket players, farmers across India's six lakh villages stand to gain from greater market access, higher profits, better technology and direct linkage with consumers.  "Direct purchase from farms has hugely benefited small farmers like us who were not getting good returns by selling in the local mandi," said Abdul Majid, from Malerkotla in Punjab, who has been selling vegetables from his one-acre farm to...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...