-Reuters   The extra irrigated area would cut India's dependence on annual monsoon rains that water crops grown on nearly half of the country's farmlands New Delhi: India plans to expand its farmland under irrigation by at least a tenth in the next three years, potentially boosting grains output by an equal proportion in the world's second-biggest rice and wheat producer, a top government official told Reuters. The extra irrigated area would cut India's...

-The New York Times   As politicians scramble for India's 815 million votes in the most expensive and closely contested general election in the nation's history, an unexpected protest is rumbling from what was once one of the country's most placid voter blocs: its farmers. The protest is inflamed by rising attention to the shocking suicide rate on India's hardscrabble farms. Since 1995, more than 290,000 farmers have killed themselves. Though that figure,...

-The Indian Express   Contrary to the popular narrative, the second green revolution is underway. A dramatic turnaround of agriculture, India's most important sector, has gone largely unheralded. Contrary to the popular narrative, agriculture has been transformed in the last 10 years. The second green revolution is underway. At the end of the second tenure of the UPA and after a decade of persistent work, we are witnessing record agricultural outputs for every...

A study by Jonathan Kennedy and Lawrence King, published in the Lancet journal Globalization and Health (2014) has found that liberalization of the agricultural sector in the early-1990s is responsible for the agrarian crisis and, therefore, farmers with certain socio-economic characteristics -- cash crops cultivators, with marginal landholdings, and debts-are particularly at risk of committing suicide. In short, the study detects that the differences in the structure of agricultural production explain...

-The Business Standard     Institutions such as World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) are considered the panacea of all ills that developing countries like India face. Although the amount of money these institutions lend is small, their influence on the economy is high. They continue to be the benchmark for social and environmental policies, good governance, climate change, corruption and so on. A look at some of the reports of these...