-TheWire.in With low levels of farmers' income and a lack of assured price mechanism, what impact will the three farm bills have in the long term on India's agrarian economy. Here's an analysis. Last week, the Union government passed three bills to replace the three ordinances that were enacted during the COVID-19 lockdown. These three bills, expected to bring revolutionary changes to agrarian context and help double farmers’ incomes are: The Farmers’...

-Vikalp.ind.in The NDA government brought a new scheme the Prime Minister Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) that became operational from 1st December 2018. It aimed to provide small and marginal farmers (SMFs) financial assistance to procure various inputs to ‘ensure proper crop health and appropriate yields’. It also aimed to protect these farmers from middlemen and moneylenders. SMFs were defined as the farmer families who collectively own cultivable land upto 2 hectares....

-The Telegraph More than half of the country's small and marginal farmers continue to be left out of the ambit of formal finance A recent report by the Reserve Bank of India found that despite a plethora of schemes aimed at financial inclusion, only 40.9 per cent of small and marginal farmers have so far been covered by the banking system. Small and marginal farmers are defined as those with operational land...

-Working Paper No. 75, July 2019, Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies, Bhubaneswar This study looks into four broad questions on smallholder agriculture, that is, the marginal and small farm sizes that constitute more than 85 per cent of the operational holdings in India. Are returns to smallholder agriculture sustainable? Is the smallholder agriculture efficient? Does the smallholder have access to formal sources of credit? Is credit provided by formal sources...

-The Telegraph There are enormous questions about implementation, and the first issue is that of identifying the farmers Everyone expected the Narendra Modi government to do something big — or at least promise something big — before the general elections. Everyone also sensed that it would be something to do with farmers, one of the economic and social concerns that have now also become a political talking point. But perhaps no one...