The members asked, among other things, “whether the government plans to set the MSP at 1.5 times the C2 (comprehensive cost) as per the Swaminathan Committee’s recommendation”. (File photo)The minimum support price (MSP) of most kharif crops saw significant increases in percentage terms in 2018-19 over the previous year, data presented by the government in Lok Sabha Tuesday show. The largest percentage increases in MSP were seen in jowar, bajra, maize, ragi and cotton. In comparison, MSP increases for rabi crops such as wheat, barley, gram, masur, and mustard were lower in 2018-19 than in 2017-18 (over the previous years).
Minister for Agriculture Radha Mohan Singh was responding to questions on the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers headed by Dr M S Swaminathan and related subjects, asked by Balabhadra Majhi of the BJD and Dinesh Trivedi of the Trinamool Congress.
The members asked, among other things, “whether the government plans to set the MSP at 1.5 times the C2 (comprehensive cost) as per the Swaminathan Committee’s recommendation”. The government said that “the Union Budget for 2018-19 had announced the pre-determined principle to keep MSP at levels of one and half times the cost of production”, and “accordingly, Government has increased the MSPs for all notified Kharif, Rabi and other commercial crops with a return of at least 50 per cent of cost of production for the agricultural year 2018-19 including paddy”.
Tip for reading list: Can Cancer Be Defeated Finally?
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018 was awarded to James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation”. The Laureates, the Nobel Committee said, showed how different strategies for inhibiting the brakes on the immune system can be used in the treatment of cancer.
Science writer Charles Graeber’s The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer tells the story of the revolutionary new way to fight cancer, which might have at last led to an actual cure for the disease. In an interview given soon after the publication of his book last November, Graeber, while warning that “the idea of raising false hope is cruel”, said that the arrival of immunotherapy was a “breakthrough”, a “penicillin moment for this disease, which is to say we have fundamentally changed our understanding of the disease and of ourselves and how our immune system interacts or has forever failed to interact with cancer”.
Science writer Charles Graeber’s The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer tells the story of the revolutionary new way to fight cancer, which might have at last led to an actual cure for the disease.Essentially, immunotherapy is about training the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. In a piece written for The Guardian last year, Graeber said that the immune system, “our usual defence against disease”, does not, in fact, ignore cancer. “Instead, cancer was taking advantage of tricks that shut down the immune system. But what if you could block those tricks and unleash the immune system’s killer T-cells against the disease?”
Graeber, says the review of the book in The New York Times, “tells an untold story that runs parallel to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s erudite 2011 cancer history, The Emperor of All Maladies”. Because conventional medical wisdom chose to attack the disease instead trying to help the body’s fight against it, “scientists became like a platoon that could get itself behind enemy lines, only to find itself without weapons… The Breakthrough is the story of this desperate war waged on a cellular level”.
