-Livemint.com Agriculture is not only crucial for what happens to growth, inflation and rural distress, it is also politically important given the simmering discontent among farmers in the last two years Last week, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) declared that the south-west monsoon has covered the entire country, 15 days earlier than normal. This may be a cause for celebration considering the distress in agriculture in the last four years. Agriculture is...

-India Climate Dialogue The meteorological department’s analysis of annual rainfall for the past 50 years has found significant increasing or decreasing trends in districts that could put a spanner into India’s food security scenario. Since June 13, there has been a hiatus in the advance of southwest monsoon in the country due to the weakening of its circulation pattern. This dry spell is expected to soon change as the monsoon is likely...

-The Indian Express “The new system will tell us the probability of rainfall according to its intensity and volume. This will be colour coded for ease of interpretation,” said IMD Director General KJ Ramesh. New Delhi: The India Met Department (IMD) on Friday launched two “very high resolution” Ensemble Prediction Systems, to generate ten-day probabilistic weather forecasts. In simple terms, the new systems in place can provide rainfall forecasts with probabilities...

The country’s agrarian sector in the last financial year expanded at almost half the rate at which it grew in 2016-17, shows the recently released provisional estimates by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). As compared to a growth rate of 6.3 percent witnessed in 2016-17, the growth rate in real Gross Value Added (GVA) by the agrarian sector (i.e., increase in agricultural GVA after neutralizing the effect of price inflation)...

-Financial Express The PMFBY involves farmers, banks, state and central government, insurance companies and re-insurers. This article is second in the series to assess performance of BJP-led NDA government at the Centre in agri-food space over the last four years. The first one appeared in this paper on April 30 (goo.gl/AGnEaJ).Here, we look at BJP’s promise in its manifesto, namely, “implement a farm insurance scheme to take care of crop loss”....