-PTI Being a strategic mineral resource, indigenous production can save the much-needed foreign exchange, in which laterites can play a significant role, like bauxite, which is mined from south Goa. Panaji (Goa): Iron ore reserves in Goa may exhaust in another 10 years and if there are too many companies involved in mining and the pace of excavation is high, the stocks may not even last for five years, an expert said...

-Business Standard The large informal sector is a consequence - not a cause - of the low level of development For decades, one of the central aims of economic policy in India has been to create conditions for workers to move from low- to high-income employment. This has usually implied a shift from the informal sector where productivity is low, to the formal sector where productivity is high. This process of “formalisation”...

-VillageSquare.in Strict parameters set by the central government has made it tougher for the states to declare a drought and seek relief funds from New Delhi Mumbai (Maharashtra): The Indian government is leaving no stone unturned to fight the occurrence of drought in the country. The Manual for Drought Management, released in December 2016 by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, prescribes “new scientific indices and parameters” for a “more...

  Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...

-The Financial Express Over 14 crore households who cultivate on land owned by others under a formal lease agreement or even under a temporary arrangement overseen by the gram panchayats or other official functionaries may soon start getting assorted sops doled out to “farmers” by the government just as their land-owing counterparts do. According to official sources, the definition of farmer will be changed via a gazzette notification to include cultivators...