-The Hindu New Delhi: Next year, India’s annual summer monsoon forecast may be made by a supercomputer running a dynamical model. The Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Madhavan Rajeevan, said the dynamical model, being tested at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, (IITM) Pune for a decade was “ready for operational purposes next year.” A dynamical monsoon model works by simulating the weather on powerful computers and extrapolating it over particular timeframes. Though...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: In chasing higher and higher GDP growth rates, India tends to gloss over two vital facts. One, farm growth cuts poverty twice as fast as industrial growth. Two, a 1% rise in agricultural output raises industrial production by 0.5% and national income by 0.7%, according to one calculation. In other words, the country’s fortunes are structurally tied to its farmers. Two-thirds of Indians rely on a farm-based income....

-The Hindu The state has become exclusively concerned with the interests of globalised capital and the domestic corporate-financial oligarchy aligned with it. The income squeeze on peasants is one consequence Central to the “reforms” introduced in 1991 was not a “retreat of the state” in favour of the “market” as is commonly supposed, but a change in the nature of the state. This change was not necessarily a conscious decision; it was...

-India Water Portal How paddy grew in popularity in Punjab and continues to steal the show, thanks to lack of alternatives for farmers. Take the roads of Punjab during the monsoon and you will find most fields turned into pools of water. It’s mainly the water pulled out from the underground vault to support the kharif crop of paddy. Neither a native plant nor suited to the agro-climatic region, paddy has...

-Frontline The inability to resolve pressing problems with respect to the production, distribution and availability of food is one of the important failures of the entire economic reform process. IN the fateful month of July 1991, when the devaluation of the Indian rupee presaged the introduction of a whole series of liberalising economic reforms, agriculture was very far from the minds of most policymakers and commentators. The immediate focus was on...