-Business Standard Directs Centre to review decision with all stakeholders in the interim and come out with a solution The Delhi High Court has stayed a Central government notification ‘restricting’ the use of controversial plant chemical glyphosate only through pest control operators (PCOs) for three months, trade and industry sources said today. In its order, the court also directed the Centre to review the decision with all stakeholders in the interim and come...

-Down to Earth Experts welcome move but call for a complete ban The Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare issued a notice October 21, 2022 restricting the use of glyphosate, a widely used herbicide, citing health hazards for humans and animals. Only authorised pest control operators are allowed to use it.  Earlier, state governments of Maharashtra, Telangana, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh have tried similar steps but failed. Pesticide Action Network (PAN) India...

Here's the wonderful thing about the FDI-in-retail debate: never have struggling Indian farmers found so many champions. They've been crawling out of the woodwork. Foreign direct investment in retail may be on hold, but Hillary Clinton can stop worrying about Anand Sharma and Pranab Mukherjee. “How does (Commerce Minister) Sharma view India's current Foreign Direct Investment guidelines? Which sectors does he plan to open further? Why is he reluctant to open multi-brand...

Degraded soils, depleting groundwater, and chemical pesticides are playing havoc, placing agriculture in terrible distress. I haven’t forgotten that night. Sitting with a group of farmers in a village in Ludhiana district in Punjab, at the height of the Green Revolution, a farmer showed me a bag of fertiliser that he brought from the market. “Why are you showing me this bag”, I asked. “Wait”, he said, and began to open the...

For past several weeks, thousands of farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Jharkhand have been left in the lurch. They had planted urd and til crops in a large acreage, and to their dismay no grain formation took place in the standing crop. Unable to bear the economic loss, at least four farmers have reportedly committed suicide. Thousands of farmers have been pushed deeper into economic distress....