-The Hindu Mysuru: Members of State Federation of Farmers and Sugarcane Cultivators Association staged a demonstration in the city on Sunday demanding India’s exit from the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The demonstration was held heeding the strike call issued by Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangha and is part of a nation-wide agitation being conducted by farmers in support of their demands. Kurubur Shanthakumar, president of Sugarcane Cultivators Association, who addressed the farmers said that ever...

-TheWire.in The crisis is well known and has been written about for decades now. Government intervention has taken place but little has changed. The Vidarbha region of Maharashtra consists of eleven districts: Akola, Amravati, Washim, Nagpur, Yavatmal, Wardha, Buldhana, Chandrapur, Bhandara, Gadchiroli and Gondia. As of 2012, 65% of the population living in this region was solely dependent on agriculture and allied activities for their livelihood and vocational needs. This is due to...

-NITI Aayog Working Paper, ISBN: 978-81-953811-7-3 Abstract -  The importance of agriculture in an economy usually declines as it climbs the development ladder. Raising agriculture productivity has been known to be an important precursor. Labour productivity in agriculture can either be increased by higher land productivity or higher land availability per farmer and mechanisation. In India, however, the dramatic increase in land productivity through industrial farming has caused severe environmental damage and...

-Down to Earth This can help in targeting global export market, thereby feeding the world population and getting valuable foreign exchange for the country India is predominantly agrarian — 80 per cent of the population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. Rice and wheat are the staple for 90 per cent of the country’s people.  Till the early 1960’s, the predominant mode of cultivation was what is now called “organic farming”, with...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...