Barely 24 hours before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is scheduled to reconvene a meeting to discuss policies on export of farm products and storage of grains, the government has conceded another major demand of Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar by allowing export of caesin, a value-added milk product.

“Export of casein and casein products has been moved from the ‘prohibited’ to ‘restricted’ category. Export of casein is now permitted under licence,” an official statement issued tonight said. The government had banned exports of casein and milk powder in February last year, following a fall in the domestic supply of milk.

Committee to review demand-supply situation after three weeks to prevent abnormal rise in prices

The commerce ministry has decided to lift the ban on export of cotton and allow traders to apply afresh for registration. The ban was lifted barely hours before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was scheduled to chair a meeting on export of farm products, including cotton. However, the Prime Minister’s meeting was later postponed.

New Delhi The government is set to lift a ban on fresh cotton export registration, although efforts to resolve the controversial issue amicably by putting a cap on further shipments eluded a consensus on Sunday, a day before the meeting convened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss farm exports.

While agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is pitching for the complete removal of ban on fresh export registration in the year through September, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and commerce and textile minister Anand Sharma are in favour of allowing fresh licences up to two million bales to balance the interest of farmers with textile mills, sources said.

Guwahati: Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Saturday assured the tea planters in Assam that he will take up the issue of declaring tea as India’s national drink with the union ministry of commerce and industry.

Ahluwalia gave the assurance while attending the 75th anniversary celebration of the Assam Tea Planters’ Association (ATPA), the first tea producers’ association formed by Indian tea planters during the pre-independence period.

In a move to invite industry to the cash-strapped Punjab, the state government is ready to amend and even bring in a new industrial policy, Industries & Commerce Minister Anil Joshi said Wednes

Irked by curbs on milk, cotton and sugar exports, Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has shot off a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stating that the government’s policies are hurting farmers who are being asked to subsidise the industry.

Mr Pawar wrote to the Prime Minister on Tuesday, a day after a group of ministers disallowed cotton export beyond 13 million bales for the current marketing year.

A group of ministers on Monday decided to continue with the ban on cotton exports, even as the prohibition on outbound shipments had led to intense political pressure on the government.

"For the time being, there is no move to ease the export ban,&" said a senior official who participated in the meeting on Monday.

JODHPUR: Union Textile and Commerce & Industry minister Anand Sharma on Saturday, while expressing concern over the closed textile units, announced to set up a high level committee to look into the damages caused by the textile industry to the local environment and ecology at Jodhpur, Barmer and Pali.

Headed by secretary, textile, the committee will work out economically viable technical solutions to get over the situation

India has told the US that it does not intend to alter the domestic content requirement in its ambitious national solar power generation programme as it is essentially procurement by the government

The Mamata Banerjee government on Monday passed its first pro-industry Bill amending Section 14Y of the West Bengal Land Reforms Act, 1955, that lifts the land ceiling in several cases of industria