-Hindustan Times Interventions such as loan waivers or MSP revisions can at best offer temporary succour. At worst, they deflect attention from the real issues behind the crisis that has been in the making for long On March 14, 2007, when 14 farmers died in a clash between villagers and police forces in Nandigram of West Bengal over acquisition of land for an industrial project, few had imagined it would mark a...

-The Financial Express A half-dozen years ago, I participated in a conference on water resource challenges in India. I remember Upmanu Lall, professor at Columbia University, graphically and bluntly making the point that Punjab’s water table was not far from collapse. This has been known for years, and there have been feeble efforts to deal with the problem, but they have been far short of what is needed. My own understanding...

-The Indian Express India faces not just a farmers’ crisis, but a serious meltdown of farming families Amongst the images of agitating farmers in Madhya Pradesh, it was striking to see how many were youngsters dressed in jeans and shirts — they were clearly not all farmers, but also farmers’ sons, unhappy with jobless growth. We are facing not just a farmers’ crisis today, but also a crisis of farming families, whose...

-Livemint.com Not only better integration of farmers with markets, but also large investments in agriculture are the need of the hour The deaths of five farmers in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur district has brought the crisis in agriculture centre stage. While the latest incident may have got media coverage, the fact is that the crisis has been in the making for some time. It intensified in the last one year but signs of...

-The Economic Times blog Farmers, from Punjab in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south, have started agitations demanding farm loans be waived. The Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra governments have already considered it politically expedient to write them off. Some other states may follow the suit. However, such decisions are as misguided as they are misleading. Nonetheless, it will be a mistake to treat the agitations as a domino effect of...