Budget 2018-19

  According to the SKM, people gathered at more than 500 locations in Punjab to express their support to the bandh Several trains were cancelled, highways and key roads blocked and many thousands stranded for hours on Monday as a nationwide 10-hour shutdown against the Centre’s three agri laws disrupted lives across parts of India, particularly in the north. The 6 am to 4 pm Bharat Bandh, which saw demonstrations and rallies in many places, passed off relatively peacefully with no reports of injuries or serious clashes. The impact was felt the most around Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh, the centre of the farm protests, and also in large pockets of Kerala, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Odisha. Farmer Protest  blocked highways and arterial roads and squatted on tracks in several places from morning as the shutdown called by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella body of 40 farmer unions, got underway. The blockade was lifted at 4 pm. The SKM claimed in a ...

  Twitter said it has taken steps to reduce the visibility of hashtags containing harmful content, which included prohibiting them from trending on Twitter and appearing as recommended search terms The government expects Twitter to fully comply with its legal notice in the matter of taking down accounts that were tweeting “ince­ndiary” hashtags related to the ongoing farmers’ protests. After a marathon meeting of top Twitter executives with officials in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Wednesday, the government, in a strongly worded statement, said that “lawfully passed orders are binding on any business entity”. MeitY Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney, while stating that  Twitter  was welcome to do business in India, expressed strong displeasure to the executives of the American firm over the way it acted after an emergency order was issued to remove the genocide- related hashtag, according to the statement. ‘’Misuse of Twitter’s platform fo...

  Rahul Gandhi says new acts will destroy country’s agriculture; V-P Naidu calls for keeping farmers’ welfare in mind while framing farm policies The members of a panel set up by the Supreme Court to resolve the crisis of farmer protests said on Tuesday they would keep aside their ideology and views while consulting stakeholders, even as they indicated a complete repeal won’t augur well for much-needed agriculture reforms. The panel met for the first time on Tuesday. The biggest challenge, the members said, is to convince the agitating farmers to come and speak with them. “We will try our best. We also want to request those farmers who don’t want to come before us that we are neither from any party nor from the government’s side. We are from the Supreme Court’s side,” said Anil Ghanwat, a member of the panel. Agriculture economist Ashok Gulati and former director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Pramod Kumar Joshi, are the remaining members of the panel....