-RuralIndiaOnline.org Ramesh Sharma is among lakhs of farmers from Bihar who earn more by working as farm labourers in Haryana than by harvesting the maize they grow at home Ramesh Sharma can’t remember the last time he spent an entire year at home. “I have been doing this for the past 15-20 years,” he says, while cutting sugarcane in a field in Gagsina village in Haryana’s Karnal district. For half of the year...

-Down to Earth Exceptional growth in agriculture and acreage in kharif season precipitate a crisis like never before for farmers   In recent times, agriculture made headlines for all the wrong reasons: Farmers quitting cultivation; the sector turning into a perennial loss-making enterprise; and the country’s official policy to downsize the dependence on agriculture to reduce overall economic hardship among the poorest of the population. Agriculture’s fast-declining economic importance reached such an extent...

-TheWire.in The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana programme will complete five years when rabi crops are harvested in March-April 2021. But it's been a bumpy ride for most of the way so far. Out of all the ‘Pradhan Mantri’ schemes launched over the last few years – and there have been quite a few – none has received as much criticism as the PM Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). Due to the variety of...

-Down to Earth Document emphasises on importance of a ‘One-Health’ approach to manage and prevent zoonotic disease outbreaks and pandemics About 60 per cent of known infectious diseases in humans and 75 per cent of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, according to a new report published recently by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Preventing the Next Pandemic:Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org Huge quantities of cash crops lie unsold across India – like cotton in Maharashtra. A hunger crisis looms, yet farmers in Vidarbha plan to sow cotton, not food crops, once again this kharif season Seventy-year-old Kisan Sakhru Pawar, patriarch of a joint farming family in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district, is very anxious. The climbing Covid-19 graph is not the main reason for his anxiety. His concern: unsold cotton. “We have 350 quintals of cotton,...