In our frantic search for solutions to our water crisis, we tend to overlook the self-evident relationship between water, food, and energy. It is still not too late. As my colleague Tony Allan, a Stockholm Water Prize laureate says so pithily, the three are the corners of a triangle with politics and emotion at its center. About 80 percent of accessible freshwater in Asia is used for agriculture; the rest...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...

A good monsoon this year will help Indian agriculture grow robustly and benefit the food processing and packaging sectors, Minister of State for Agriculture and Consumer Affairs K. V. Thomas said Tuesday. 'Companies which have invested in supply chain of farming like contract farming, food processing and packaging will benefit greatly from good agricultural output,' he said at a conference organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry. He said good agricultural growth...

Union Minister for Agriculture Sharad Pawar today expressed unhappiness over non-availing of agricultural  loan by the farmers of the North-Eastern States in the way it was expected, which he feels has hampered investment and finally the overall agricultural production of the region. "Though the Centre has doubled the agricultural credit amount recently and Centre has been able to disburse Rs 3, 50,000 crore this year, the North Eastern States have not...

The rapid increase in urbanisation and allied infrastructure development activities are causing a shrinking of agricultural land in the Kashmir Valley. Farmers fear that this growing trend of private builders to purchase farmland for building residential colonies would lead to a devastating food crisis in that Kashmir Valley in the coming years. Though the law prevents the use of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes, the allotment of the land for construction comes...