Potato farmers Madhusudan Mondal and Lakshman Adak, in their mid-50s, live 15km apart in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. Both have produced a bumper crop this year, but that has meant different things for Mondal and Adak. Mondal earned around Rs3.5 lakh selling 150 tonnes of potatoes to PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt. Ltd, having signed a contract with the maker of carbonated beverages and Frito-Lay chips to sell his produce to it...
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Pepsico engages 12,000 farmers in contract farming
Riding on high sales of its snacks brands like Lays and Uncle Chipps, Pepsico has engaged 12,000 farmers across the country for contract farming of potato. "There are 12,000 farmers doing contract farming of potato for us involving 16,000 acres of land," Executive Vice-president of Pepsico Holdings (agro-business) Nischint Bhatia said. He said that out of the 12,000 farmers, 6,500 of them are in West Bengal working 2,600 acres. Bhatia...
More »Delhi water table falling by 2m/yr by Dipak Kumar Dash
The alarm bells are ringing right below our feet. Delhi and portions of Rajasthan falling in the National Capital Region (NCR) extract almost double the amount of groundwater than is recharged every year. The situation is equally bad in NCR portions of Haryana, particularly Gurgaon and Faridabad, which largely depend on groundwater. A status report on groundwater by the NCR Planning Board (NCRPB) reveals that the water table in Delhi...
More »Guaranteeing unemployment
It is true that, at 119 crore person-days, the employment created this year by the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), the government’s flagship programme, is tiny, a fraction of one percentage point of the total employment in the country. But a more meaningful way of looking at its potential impact, however, is to see that around half the country’s workforce has registered for a job under it...
More »Harvesting freshness by Surinder Sud
Indian farmers are known to be second to none when it comes to adoption of new technology. But, what is not so well-appreciated is that many of them are daring enough to take a break from traditional crops and venture into wholly new fields and make a success of it through their own ingenuity or with some institutional or state help. There are countless instances of such endeavours. The agriculture ministry...
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