It was notified in May 2015 with the objective of maximising indigenous urea production, promoting energy efficiency in the urea units and rationalizing the subsidy burden on the Government.

All organic products exports in the country are certified by Agricultural & Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), Ministry of Commerce and Industry under the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP).

National Mission on Sustainable Agriculture (NSAM), Organic Value Chain Development in North Eastern Region (OVCDNER) and Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY) taken up to encourage organic agriculture.

  To provide the means of evaluation of certification programme for organic agriculture and products (including wild harvest, aquaculture, livestock products) as per the approved criteria.

Given the stiff capital requirements of Basel-3, too, the government will have to address the issue of control of state-owned banks and decide whether it is willing to distance itself from their governance and allow the lenders to operate professionally and compete with their private sector peers without any binding constraints.

The merger is expected to yield benefits in the form of improved operational synergies, higher productivity, mitigating of geographical risks and rationalisation of cost of operations. The other positive could be improved profitability, a key consideration in any exercise of this kind, and the promise of access for customers of associate banks to the wide array of products of the SBI with an additional cushion — access to the high capital base of the erstwhile Bharatiya Mahila Bank.

the State Bank of India, has managed to merge five of its associate banks,

sessions trials where the accused are in custody be concluded within two years

The apex court asked high courts to issue directions to lower courts that bail applications should be disposed of within a week

e decision to work during its holidays on cases involving constitutional questions comes on the heels of an “action plan” framed by the Supreme Court last month for cases more ordinary.

The expression “minorities” has been employed at only four places in the Indian Constitution. The headnote of Article 29 uses “minorities”. Then the expression “minorities or minority” has been employed in the headnote of Article 30 and in clauses (1) and (2) of Article 30. Interestingly, no definition of the term is given in the constitution.

Minority rights are essential in a democratic, pluralistic polity because as Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, “no democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities”

a large body of evidence shows that the MGNREGA has been reasonably well-targeted across social groups and time. To evaluate school meals (MDM) through the narrow prism of targeting, when its main objectives are to contribute to better enrolment, attendance, nutrition, learning efforts, socialisation, etc betrays the Survey’s desperation for fiscal space

However, as research on these has shown encouraging results (for example, implicit transfers from the PDS reduced one-fifth of the poverty gap in 2009-10), an explicit case needs to be made for dismantling them.

It turns out that the data was about two decades old — latest estimates suggest that the corresponding figure was only 5 per cent or so in 2011-2012, possibly even less today.