-Down to Earth Incentivising farmers to sell solar power as a remunerative crop can help reduce the usage of diesel pumps The irrigation-energy nexus in India's agriculture sector is characterised primarily by depleting groundwater and a growing debt burden of power distribution companies (DISCOM). This is due to massive power subsidies that remain underfunded by the states.   The Government of India (GoI) has been promoting solar irrigation pumps by offering substantial investment...

-Down to Earth Employment in agriculture has increased. Will it lead to shed the belief that agriculture will not be able to employ further? The latest data of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a non-government research agency, points out an interesting trend in employment in India. An increasing number of people are joining agriculture for employment in a shift from non-farm sectors like manufacturing and other informal jobs. The CMIE analysis...

-TheWire.in The ‘vikas’ train has begun to chug the wrong way, as it were. A worrisome aspect of the Indian economy is reflected in the share of employment in agriculture dramatically rising from 42.5% of the total employed in 2018-19 to 45.6% in 2019-20. This may signify an unusually large movement of labour from industry or services sectors to agriculture. The total number of persons employed in India varies between 400 million and...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-The Hindu Business Line A sustainable collectivisation of agri produce and marketing, through Farmer Producer Organisations, will help the highly fragmented agriculture sector realise its full revenue potential. It is widely known that India’s agriculture sector has a challenge of lack of scale. Around 80 per cent of our farmers are small and marginal, with less than two hectares of land. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) have been posed for years as the...