-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...

-The Indian Express Policy still hasn’t adjusted itself to address the crisis of agricultural produce deflation. India’s agricultural output grew by hardly 2.7 per cent during the last October-December quarter. That isn’t bad, if one takes the corresponding year-on-year increases for the preceding 10 quarters; these have ranged between 4.2 per cent and 7.5 per cent. The cause for concern is that these reasonably good production growth rates in “real” terms...

-The Indian Express The state has reported 13.13 lakh hectare of chana acreage as compared to 19.77 lakh hectare last year. The acreage had come down this year due to moisture stress from the drought. Pune: Gram growers in the drought-hit district of Marathwada are facing reduced yield and low prices. Low demand and offloading stock by government agencies have dimmed the prices of good realisation for farmers this year. Farmers in...

-The Hindu Business Line Despite a lively debate in recent weeks on whether food prices have now moved to being structurally low, analysts believe that this is only a transient phenomenon and food prices, on a sequential basis, have already begun to rise. Retail inflation may be at an 18-month low but prices, especially of food items, are likely to see a pick-up over the next few months with average inflation expected...

  The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...