-The Hindu The average rural Indian household is a marginal landowner, growing mainly cereals on a small patch of land and reliant on groundwater for irrigation, new official data show. Over 80 per cent of rural households have marginal landholdings of less than one hectare (10,000 square metres) and just seven per cent own more than two hectares, data on household land ownership from the National Sample Survey Office show. Tribal people are...

-Business Standard Unless irrigation expands, agriculture will not be drought-proof Even as India celebrates the golden jubilee of the Green Revolution, the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has come out with data indicating that nearly 70 per cent of farmers subsist on economically unviable farm holdings of less than a hectare in size. Over one-fifth of farm households report salaried employment, and not farming, as the prime source of their income. Around...

-Business Standard Looking at economics behind agricultural households, a survey notes that 68.3% of such households still relied on agriculture as primary source of income Rural distress is a known story but a survey by NSSO has revealed the alarming level of fragmentation in farmland and unavailability of jobs. As many as 69 per cent agricultural households own less than a hectare of farmland each, making farming unviable and forcing migration to...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-The Hindu In Bihar, ‘development’ comes laced with caste. For the upper castes, it is Modi’s pitch on investment that matters while for Backward Classes, Nitish’s social welfare agenda makes him a governance icon. The BJP, having no regional match for Nitish, has banked on Modi’s popularity. “Development” is a word that one encounters frequently across poll-bound Bihar, with people across caste lines using it to explain their political preferences. However, this...