-The Hindu Business Line This method is more productive and cost effective in agriculture, which accounts for 80% of the water consumed Water scarcity has now reached a new level in India. While severe drinking water scarcity is noticed commonly everywhere, farmers are facing a lot of difficulties in cultivating crops with reduced water availability in different regions. What is worrying is that water scarcity is expected to aggravate further in the...

-Economic and Political Weekly The changes in Odisha’s agriculture made paddy production a losing proposition, especially for the small farmers who leased in land. Substantial decline in farm income caused by exploitative land lease arrangements, denial of access to a regulated market, crop failures, increased Cost of Cultivation, and indebtedness pushed these farmers into severe economic hardship and an inhospitable social environment, which ultimately led to their suicides. Please click here to read more....

-Working Paper No. 74, Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies, Bhubaneswar In this paper, we revisit the well-known debate on the inverse relationship between farm-size and agricultural productivity. Using unit level data from Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of Agricultural Households in the 70th Round National Sample Survey (NSS), we test the relationship between yield (output per hectare) and land operated as well as the relationship between net returns per hectare and...

-The Telegraph There are enormous questions about implementation, and the first issue is that of identifying the farmers Everyone expected the Narendra Modi government to do something big — or at least promise something big — before the general elections. Everyone also sensed that it would be something to do with farmers, one of the economic and social concerns that have now also become a political talking point. But perhaps no one...

Against the backdrop of the Finance Minister Shri Piyush Goyal announcing the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PMKSN) programme during his budget speech on 1st February, 2019, it becomes essential to differentiate between 12.56 crore operational holding households (enumerated, as per the Agriculture Census) and 13.33 crore ownership holding households (estimated, as per the 70th round National Sample Survey report no. 571) pertaining to size upto 2 hectares. In his budget...