-PTI About Rs. 1.47 lakh crore of agricultural loans are outstanding in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh Asian Development Bank (ADB) Country Director Kenichi Yokoyama Friday said farm loan waivers were against economic prINCiples and cannot effectively address the agrarian distress. Yokoyama also advocated for direct transfer of funds to targeted beneficiaries as it would cut down leakages. On farm loan waiver, he said most of the people are sceptical about it as an...

-The Economic Times To observers outside Kerala, Sabarimala is all about misogyny, a misguided mass construing one strand of anti-woman tradition as a pillar of faith. But to those in Kerala, it is INCreasingly clear that resurgence of caste marks the Sabarimala protests, gender injustice being one element subsumed in that assertion of caste. At the beginning of the 20th century, Kerala’s caste system practised unapproachability. Even proximity could pollute. The Nair...

-TheWire.in In an interview with The Wire, former secretary to the government of India P.S. Krishnan says economically weaker sections require financial aid, not reservation. P.S. Krishnan, the former secretary to government of India, was one of the crucial people behind the enactment of several historic laws regarding social justice. The current Bill proposed by the government to provide reservation to economically weaker upper castes in jobs and education, he says, violates...

-The Indian Express The unprecedented procurement of pulses and oilseeds in the last couple of years has created problems — and opportunities. If there’s one area in agriculture where the Narendra Modi government has probably broken fresh ground, it is in the procurement of pulses and oilseeds.   During the 2016-17 and 2017-18 agricultural years (July-June), the Central agencies — National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (Nafed), Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC)...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...