-The Indian Express Agriculture needs a champion in the Union cabinet. July, this year, marks the silver jubilee of economic reforms. It is time to take stock of our major successes and failures. There is a saying that bad times are often good for policies and good times are bad for policies. It is well-known that the foreign exchange crisis, with reserves falling to as low as $1.5 billion, triggered fundamental changes...

-HuffingtonPost.com In Bundelkhand, people struggle for every drop of water they can find. TIKAMGARH DISTRICT: For years, Lakshman Pal, 28, planted wheat and tended to his small field here. Each season, he hoped for rain. He looked up at the sky and waited for the showers that normally came. But for the past two years, they’ve hardly come at all. His crops eventually withered and died, crumbling to dust. In early May, Pal...

-The Times of India New Delhi: Veteran journalist P Sainath has made a strong demand for declaring agriculture a public service. He also believes there needs to be a special session of Parliament to discuss the farmer crisis and the decade-old report of National Commission of Farmers chaired by professor M S Swaminathan. The author of Everybody Loves A Good Drought delivered the inaugural lecture of a monthly lecture series planned by...

-The New Indian Express If a government survey report is to be believed, an agricultural household harvests a debt of Rs 3,000 every month, forget about making money to sustain itself. The agricultural household 70th round survey of National Sample Survey Office conducted during July 2012 and June 2013 has revealed that the total income of an agricultural household per month was just Rs 6,426. On the other hand, the total...

-The Indian Express Across the country, wage employment generated under the scheme has gone up from 32 crore person-days in April - May 2015 to 51 crore person-days in the corresponding months of 2016. Signalling an increase in uptake of MGNREGA work on the ground owing to drought as well as the slow revival of the scheme itself, the person-days generated in the first two months of the financial year has gone...