BIHAR

In a first in the country, 20,173 farmers of four Bihar districts have been given over Rs 12 crore as advance input subsidy for organic farming of vegetables.
Chief minister Nitish Kumarreleased the subsidy — Rs 6,000/farmer — into the farmers’ mobile e-wallets at a state agriculture department’s function in Patna on Saturday. Around 5,500 farmers attending the function checked their mobile phones and confirmed on the spot that they had received the message about the transfer of the subsidy money.

The beneficiaries have already been registered with the agriculture department’s online services. They were selected from Patna, Nalanda, Samastipur and Vaishali districts where organic farming has been launched as a pilot project. It will be later extended to other districts along the Ganga.

Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi said the agriculture department’s budget increased 123 times from Rs 20 crore in 2005-06 to Rs 2,266 crore in the current fiscal.

INTERNATIONAL

· Wimbledon Champions’ Prize Money Hiked By 50,000

According to the Wimbledon officials, the 2018 men’s and women’s singles champions will receive £2.25 million,an increase of £50,000 on last year.
Lower-ranked players at Wimbledon will enjoy a greater uplift, with an increase of 10% across qualifying and the first to fourth rounds of the singles, boosting the overhaul prize money total to £34 million this year.
Wimbledon officials warned players they face losing prize money if they withdraw after competing with an existing injury and are not perceived to have given maximum effort.
There were a total of seven mid-match withdrawals in the 2017 tournament.

· Cultural Festival in Egypt to Commemorate 157th Birth Anniversary Of Rabindranath Tagore

India is organizing a five-day cultural festival in Egypt to commemorate the 157th birth anniversary of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
An exhibition on the paintings of Tagore titled ‘Rabindranath Tagore: Rhythm in Colours’ will be held at the Museum of Ahmed Shawky at Giza as part of the Tagore festival.
The festival is being organized by the Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Culture, the cultural wing of the Indian Embassy in Cairo.

NATIONAL

In order to establish 1,50,000 the Health and Wellness Centres (HWC)by 2022, share and give a common understanding of the multiple components to enable HWC to deliver comprehensive primary health care, a two-day conference was organized under Ayushman Bharat.
The conference was organized by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare with technical support from the National Health Systems Resource Centre, recently.
Workshop proceedings started with an overview presentation of the various components of Comprehensive Primary Health Care.
It emphasized the critical importance of selecting motivated candidates as Mid-Level Health Providers and strengthening the Primary Health Care team including the Multi-Purpose Workers (male and female) and ASHA.
The importance of the shift from selective to comprehensive primary health care, the uninterrupted availability of medicines for chronic diseases, and the criticality in establishing a seamless continuum of care, to build trust and confidence in the public health system and in reducing out of pocket expenditure were highlighted.
In addition, the importance of integrating active case finding for tuberculosis in HWC to meet the national commitment of TB elimination was emphasized.

Central government is expanding the reach of a scheme to improve socio-economic infrastructure for minorities in education, health and skill development from 196 to 308 districts of the country. From 27 states and UTs, the programme, which was last year allocated Rs 3,972 crore to be spent over three years, will now be implemented in districts across 32 states and UTs.
“Between 33% and 40% of resources under the PMJVK (Pradhan Mantri Jan Vikas Karyakram) would be specifically allocated for women-centric projects.

The states with the highest number of districts which will benefit from the PMJVK are Uttar Pradesh (43), Maharashtra (27), Karnataka, Bengal and Rajasthan (16 each), Gujarat, Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala (13 each), Tamil Nadu (12), Madhya Pradesh (8), Haryana and Manipur (7 each) and Punjab (2).

The Multi-sectoral Development Programme (MsDP), which was launched in 2008, has now been restructured as the PMJVK and will now cover five more states and UTs: Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Nagaland, Goa and Puducherry. Besides, 61 “aspirational districts”— the most backward ones which have concentrations of minorities — have also been brought under its purview.

Karnataka is going to be the fifth one in the latest round of waivers which started in UP last year, triggering similar demands in other states.
With three states — UP, Maharashtra and Punjab — having already implemented it as part of their poll promises, Rajasthan, which is going to polls later this year, also recently announced a waiver for small and marginal farmers. UP had announced a waiver for crop loans of up to Rs 1 lakh for nearly 87 lakh small and marginal farmers while Punjab had promised waiver for farm loans of up to Rs 2 lakh for farmers with less than 5 acres of land.

It had also promised to waive off loans of bigger farmers. The scheme is being implemented in the state in a phased manner, depending on the size of landholdings and loan amount.

Before the UP government’s move, a mega loan waiver scheme in the country was implemented in 2008 when the then centre government had initially announced a waiver of Rs 60,000-crore loan for small and marginal farmers. It was later extended to the large farmers as well.