-Business Standard/ India Spend 52% of India's agricultural households are indebted; with an average outstanding loan of Rs 47,000 India’s foodgrain production rose five times over six decades, according to 2016 government data, the latest available. But with the average Indian farm half as large as it used to be 50 years ago and yields among the lowest in developing economies, both the agriculture sector and farmers have been driven to the...
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Think beyond loan waivers -Ramesh Chand & SK Srivastava
-The Hindu Strengthening the repayment capacity of farmers by improving and stabilising their income is the only way to keep them out of distress Indian agriculture is characterised by low scale and low productivity. About 85% of the operational landholdings in the country are below 5 acres and 67% farm households survive on an average landholding of one acre. More than half of the area under cultivation does not have access to...
More »Small-scale fishermen form the backbone of India's fisheries sector, but policy is silent on them -John Kurien
-Scroll.in The National Policy on Marine Fisheries is tentative and fails to address the real problems of traditional fishing communities. Though India cannot call itself a nation of fish-eaters, it does have some of the world’s richest fishery resources and an Exclusive Economic Zone in the ocean the size of 60% of its land area. It ranks third in world fish production with a harvest of 6.3 million tonnes. This is...
More »How farm loan waivers can actually benefit the economy -Charan Singh
-The Financial Express The fastest-growing major economy of the world cannot ignore its farmers as there is a genuine need to help the farming sector which is suffering from stress on account of indebtedness. The banking industry is also not able to extend credit to those farmers who are in default. A loan waiver can help bankers to renew the loans, and farmers can use the borrowed money for production of...
More »The roots of rural distress -Manas Chakravarty
-Livemint.com Forgiving farm loans is no solution. The data shows there’s a far more fundamental problem—most agricultural households are unable to keep body and soul together. There’s nothing new about rural distress. Nor is it surprising. If the income of almost 70% of farm households is less than their consumption expenditure, according to the government’s own data, then it’s obvious they’ll be “distressed”. Yet that’s the inescapable conclusion from the National Sample...
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