-The New Indian Express As polling season concludes across the country, The Sunday Standard puts an ear to the ground and listens in to the expectations that India has from its next government NEW DELHI: Agrarian irony cries out in Punjab, the food bowl of the country, with farmers’ indebtedness only growing in recent years. The agrarian irony is marked by overproduction in the face of inadequate price, with lopsided institutional credit,...
More »SEARCH RESULT
A wake-up call on proprietary seeds -Mrinalini Kochupillai & Gregory Radick
-The Hindu How India can shift its agriculture from a high-yield ideal to a high-value one When the news broke that PepsiCo was suing small farmers in India for growing a potato variety that is used in its Lay’s chips, popular sympathies immediately went, of course, to the farmers. National and international pressure swiftly mounted, and in short order a humbled PepsiCo backtracked, announcing its withdrawal of the lawsuit. There was global...
More »More Than a Year After Crop Failure, Maharashtra Farmers Still Wait for Insurance Payout -Poorvi Kulkarni
-TheWire.in For many farmers, the compensation they received is substantially less than the premium they paid. Parbhani (Maharashtra): “If even one rupee owed to one farmer is not paid, then the government will pay that money and recover it from the (insurance) company,” said Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis while addressing an rally ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He was referring to the Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme (Pradhan Mantri...
More »MGNREGA: Drought-hit India abandoned 18 lakh water works in just one year -Richard Mahapatra & Raju Sajwan
-Down to Earth India's villages miss a golden chance to become drought-proof as more MGNREGA projects grind to a halt Almost half of India is currently under drought; for many districts this is the second-consecutive drought. Given this, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) should have been the key scheme to not only mitigate impacts of drought but also employ people in distress for earning. But an analysis of...
More »Systemic transformation in agriculture must put the farmer at the centre -Arunabha Ghosh
-Hindustan Times Farming must become sustainable since agriculturists are struggling to build resilience against many threats I spent international women’s day in Mangalagiri, in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, with Usha Rani. As a single mother for 17 years, she has raised two children (now in second-year college and in high school). Three years ago, she switched to natural farming. On less than half an acre, she practises multicropping, growing maize, banana,...
More »