-Scroll.in The minimum support price of Rs 5,050 per quintal barely covers the input cost, yet the going market rate is just about Rs. 4,500. Sudhakar Patil, 65, is a farmer in Bhayar Chincholi village in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district. He cultivates a mix of tur, urad and moong on his 11-acre farm in the kharif season and chana and wheat in winter. In a good year, when there’s water in the...
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How farm loan waivers can actually benefit the economy -Charan Singh
-The Financial Express The fastest-growing major economy of the world cannot ignore its farmers as there is a genuine need to help the farming sector which is suffering from stress on account of indebtedness. The banking industry is also not able to extend credit to those farmers who are in default. A loan waiver can help bankers to renew the loans, and farmers can use the borrowed money for production of...
More »Why bumper harvests spell doom -Ashok Gulati & Prerna Terway
-The Indian Express With a glut in agricultural production, prices have fallen below MSPs. The government needs to get the agri-market right to address the farm crisis The farmers’ protests in Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Maharashtra indicate that all is not well on the economic front, especially agriculture. If such unrest could happen in MP, which claims to have registered the fastest agri-GDP growth at 9.7 per cent per year during...
More »Two charts show why western Madhya Pradesh became the epicentre of violent farmer protests -Mridula Chari
-Scroll.in Soyabean, the main crop of Malwa region, has seen a sharp fall in prices. As a small-time commission agent who buys soyabean from farmers on behalf of oilseed crushing companies in Indore, Manilal Patel has a ringside view of what sparked the farmer unrest in western Madhya Pradesh this month. The fertile Malwa plateau here produces around 20% of India’s’s soyabean. As much as 80% of the crop used to be...
More »Why a price increase alone won't help farmers -Elumalai Kannan
-The Hindu Fundamental problems of crop and regional bias of MSP policy, govt. procurement and access to institutional credit need to be addressed. Agricultural distress is often viewed as a short-term phenomenon in which farmers look for support from various quarters on account of being unable to get a gainful return due to price crash, poor marketing facilities, rising credit burden, increasing cost of inputs and frequent occurrence of natural calamities. A...
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