-DNA Govt gears up to ring-fence farmers, prices from poor rains India's farm sector shrank for the first time in five years in the year ended March 31, Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said on Wednesday, a day after the government forecast a likely drought this year that could hit output again. The Met office cut this year's monsoon forecast on an El Nino weather pattern that has raised fears of...

-Business Today The father of India's green revolution, M.S. Swaminathan, is involved in the conservation and cultivation of millet. He tells Business Today why millet is important. Q. Why did millet vanish from our fields? Swaminathan: In the past, in agriculture, a wide range of food crops were grown. Gradually, with market-oriented agriculture, the food basket shrunk, not only in India, but all over the world. As wheat, rice, corn, soyabean, potato became...

-The Indian Express During the election campaign, the BJP had promised a 50 per cent profit margin on minimum support prices to farmers. But over the past year, the optimism of farmers has turned to despair. Since the parliamentary elections, basmati paddy prices have fallen by 35 per cent and cotton by 25 per cent. The era of cooperative federalism notwithstanding, the Centre practically decreed that states not announce a crop...

-The Hindu In the present state of the economy, when there is excess capacity in manufacturing, adequate stocks of foodgrain and the inflation rate is trending downwards, there is an opportune moment for a public investment-centred fiscal expansion Over the past eight months, the government has issued some strong statements on the economy and taken some bold steps aimed at transforming it. As it prepares to present its first real budget we...

-The Indian Express In an article in these columns (‘A fertile mess', IE, December 11), Ashok Gulati says India has landed its fertiliser industry in a mess because of rising subsidies, lagging investment, unbalanced use of fertilisers and diversion of urea for other uses, among other things. He blames it all on administered pricing and subsidy costs, and advocates the increase of urea prices or cash transfer of the fertiliser subsidy...