-The Hindu India’s poor AOI is a stark reminder of the need to attain a key sustainable development goal of higher agri-growth While the overall budgetary allocation towards the agricultural sector has marginally increased by 4.4% in the Union Budget 2022-23, the rate of increase is lower than the current inflation rate of 5.5%-6%. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) report for 2001 to 2019 shows that,...

-Centre for Science and Environment India has one of the highest arable land areas in the world1 with a net sown area of 140.1 million hectares (ha).2 Agriculture and allied sectors employ 54.6 per cent of the total workforce in India (2019–20).3 The country successfully adopted the Green Revolution in the 1960s—an input and chemical-intensive agriculture model—to overcome food scarcity by use of high yield varieties, pesticides, fertilizers, and agriculture machinery...

-Centre for Science and Environment * Releases new report that presents irrefutable evidence of the benefits of non-chemical agriculture * Yesterday’s Budget promises to promote chemical-free natural farming, but it is a half-hearted promise at best, as no separate allocation has been made in it, says CSE * CSE’s asks: Invest in organic and natural farming. Make it a mass movement New Delhi, February 2, 2022: “Despite the push given to it through periodic...

-Down to Earth Blaming farmers alone won’t work; prices for crops other than paddy must be remunerative The Election Commission has announced the dates for Assembly elections in five states of the country including Punjab. The atmosphere regarding the Assembly elections is getting more and more dramatic every day. As in many previous Assembly elections, promises, claims and new promises are being made and repeated by the various political parties to win...

-Financial Express According to Rao, the ICAR committee went through more than 1,400 scientific journals on various methods of promotion of sustainable agriculture besides interacting with farmers who have claimed to have adopted ZBNF across seven states. Large scale adoption of Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF)  — farm practices which exclude all synthetic chemical inputs and promote use of on-farm biomass — would result in ‘tremendous reduction’ in production of agricultural crops...