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On the morning of January 17, KK Sanal Kumar strapped a motorised sprayer onto his back and left for a paddy field near his home in Peringara gram panchayat of Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district. The owners of the field, Unnikrishnan and Sanil, gave him several bottles of the highly hazardous pesticide Viraat to spray on their 40-day-old crop. The field forms a part of the 55,000-hectare rice-growing area in the Kuttanad region, popularly known as Kerala’s rice bowl.

Financial Express

With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6% of their annual income. This level of support, unless augmented further, may not go far to win farmers’ confidence. Majority would agree that farmers have been under stress for quite some time, and have not got justice so far.

Udaipur Kiran

Addressing the gathering, President Ram Nath Kovind complimented Haryana for adopting proper methods for stubble burning which led to decrease in air pollution in the Delhi-NCR region.