-Down to Earth Ensuring that pulses sell at the minimum support price and distributing them under the public distribution system can help them find favour with farmers again When India went into its first lockdown in 2020, the government announced Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), under which over 800 million people were to be provided rice, wheat, and pulses, in addition to the ration provided under the public distribution system...

-Down to Earth  The past three decades have seen stagnation in acreage, production and productivity of pulses across the country due to a bevy of reasons that include availability of more profitable crops The primary reason behind India’s domestic shortage in pulses is stagnation of production over the past five decades. Overcoming the Pulses Crisis, a 2010 report by the Confederation of Indian Industry, states the production of pulses grew only by...

Poisonous snakebites have killed more than a million Indians in the last two decades, finds a recently published article entitled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study. Published in the open access journal elifesciences.org, the research-based study has found that the country accounts for nearly half the total number of annual deaths in the world caused by snakebite envenoming. Who are the...

-Newsclick.in The 134-page report was released by the commission on July 16 in Delhi. New Delhi: “The police was coordinating with the mob and the mob kept on chanting, ‘Dilli Police Zindabad’ (Long Live Delhi Police),” says a Delhi Minorities Commission report detailing the communal violence in North-East Delhi in February this year. The Commission has cast serious doubts on the credibility and impartiality of the Delhi Police on July 16 while...

-The Telegraph Panel blames speeches by BJP leaders The Delhi Minorities Commission has accused Union home minister Amit Shah, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath and other BJP politicians of “fanning communal sentiments” through incendiary speeches before the February riots in the capital. It has also alleged that “police were complicit and abetted the attacks” during the riots, which killed 53 people, and arrested victims rather than the people they accused. One of the key...