NEWS

Union defence minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday urged farmers to understand the new agricultural laws.

Addressing the state level Annapurna Utsav virtually as the chief guest in Haryana, Singh said he has read the new farm laws and there is no such sentence anywhere in it which is not in the interest of the farmers.

“I am also the son of a farmer and I have also done farming and I can understand the problems of the farmers,” he added.

Singh said due to the old policies, agriculture was becoming a loss-making deal and when the farmer used to sell his crop, it was found that even the cost price was not met.

The Gujarat high court on Thursday stayed six amended provisions in the anti-conversion law covering interfaith marriages, popularly known as “anti-love jihad law”. The court clarified that the amended sections would not apply in cases of inter-religious marriages, which take place without force, allurement or fraudulent means.

Staying the amended sections in the Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Act, 2021, the bench of Chief Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Biren Vaishnav said, “The interim order is to protect the parties of interfaith marriage from being unnecessarily harassed.”

The stay on these sections effectively means that an FIR under this law cannot be lodged merely on the basis of an interfaith marriage.

With more than six crore doses of Covid-19 vaccines administered, the Uttar Pradesh government has left behind all other states including Maharashtra, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and others.

Apart from vaccination, Uttar Pradesh is also the state that has conducted the most number of Covid-19 tests. Implementing the triple-T strategy of targeting, testing and tracking, the Uttar Pradesh government seems to have managed to bring the number of Covid-19 cases in the state under control.

Under its massive vaccination campaign, Uttar Pradesh is administering vaccines at the mini cluster-based block level. Over the past two months, the pace of vaccination has rapidly increased in the state.

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the implementation of National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) — a new Centrally sponsored scheme with a special focus on the Northeast and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This comes less than a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned in his Independence Day speech that oil palm has a huge potential in the Northeast.

The Cabinet also approved a revival package of Rs 77.45 crore for revival of the North Eastern Regional Agricultural Marketing Corporation Limited (NERAMAC) — a central Public Section Enterprise under the administrative control of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Regional (MDoNER).