The Economic Times

The Cotton Association of India (CAI) has estimated exports for the season 2018-19 at 47 lakh bales which are lower by 22 lakh bales compared to the export of 69 lakh bales estimated during last year.

The Hindu

It is around 9.30 a.m. Left Democratic Front (LDF) workers at Chekadi, a settlement on the lap of the South Wayanad forest division, in the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency are busy making final arrangements for the launch of LDF candidate P. P. Suneer’s third round of election campaign, unmindful of the blistering morning sun.

DNA

The Congress party took the issue of non-payment of crop insurance to farmer to the streets, with three MLAs camping out on Monday night at the office of Director of Agriculture. They demanded the details of the status of settlement of claims of farmers and after they failed to get any details from the government, claimed that the party will make it a campaign issue.

The Hindu Business Line

Nearly 70 years ago, the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru profoundly declared: ‘Everything can wait except agriculture’. However, in recent decades, agriculture has been in a state of benign neglect by successive governments. While manufacturing and services sectors have surely moved on, the farm sector continues to remain neglected and mired in structural challenges.

World Economic Forum

What goes into making plants taste good? For scientists in MIT’s Media Lab, it takes a combination of botany, machine-learning algorithms, and some good old-fashioned chemistry.

News 18

Nestled at the foothills of the Satpura ranges is the small village of Bisapur Kalan in the Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh. Farmer Buddhman Singh has successfully experimented with growing capsicum in the open (unlike many places that grow it in poly houses). The secret to his success? Drip irrigation.

The Cleaner

The National Standards Curriculum (NSC) has been exposing students in primary and secondary schools to agriculture, says National Technical and Vocational, Education and Training (TVET) Director in the Education, Youth and Information Ministry, Denworth Finnikin.

Youth ki Awaaz

Picture the situation of a woman holding the skull of her dead husband. Imagine a group of women marching in the streets of Delhi with the picture of their dead husbands who committed suicide due to agrarian woes, hung around their shoulders.

The Wire

Last year, Rajasthan’s farmers were promised two farm loan waivers. The first was by the previous Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government, meant for small and marginal farmers who had defaulted on short-term loans from cooperative banks. The other was by the newly formed Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government that announced a complete loan waiver within two days of coming to power and executed its ‘first phase’ by waiving outstanding short-term crop loans of the cooperative societies.

The Times of India

Heavy rain and hailstorms on Monday lashed parts of Punjab and Haryana causing damage to vegetables, green fodder and mainly wheat crop. In Haryana, unseasonal rain and hailstorm caused damage to the standing wheat crop in villages falling under Sadhaura, Bilaspur, Khizrabad, Ranjitpur areas of Yamunanagar district and Naraingarh and Shahzadpur areas of Ambala

The Better India

Up until two decades ago, Telangana (then a part of undivided Andhra Pradesh) was a hotbed for farmer suicides. Chemical farming, one of the perils of the Green Revolution, was rampant at the time.

Cogencies

Rates on commercial papers of non-banking finance companies rose 10-15 basis points today due to low demand from fund houses, which are witnessing low inflows into their debt schemes, dealers said.

The Indian Express

Harish Damodaran’s article, ‘White gold: How a revolution was reversed’ (IE, March 21) has been described by Indian colleagues as mischievous. But as a scientist who has analysed cotton production worldwide for 45 years and Indian cotton for the past decade, I would call the article misinformed on biology and based on a macroeconomic argument that has little to do with how well most farmers are doing. I doubt Damodaran would base his household economics on aggregate national statistics; yet that is the argument he is making with regards to Bt cotton production in India. The real question is how well are farmers doing, and not whether India is number one or two in cotton production ...