-TheWire.in Perhaps we can visualise a farmers’ march 20 years from now, with one more demand: resettlement, for lands and homes they have lost to the vagaries of a shifting climate. A few years ago, a group of us from Delhi, along with members of the Gujarat Agricultural Labour Union and the International Union of Foodworkers, went to eastern Gujarat to speak to farmers about how a changing climate could be affecting...

-Livemint.com China’s example shows the benefits of the rural workforce shifting from the farm to the non-farm sector The government announced its ambitious dream of doubling farmers’ income by 2022-23 in 2015-16. Incomes would have to grow annually by 10.4% to double in seven years. The data on growth rates of farm income given by NITI Aayog in its policy paper on doubling farmers’ income shows that the real income of farmers has...

-Scroll.in Notified in September, the rules will facilitate the development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dump After ignoring repeated directions from the Supreme Court to notify stricter rules to protect the country’s wetlands, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has gone and done just the opposite. On September 26, it published the Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017 – replacing the older rules dating back to...

-The Financial Express A half-dozen years ago, I participated in a conference on water resource challenges in India. I remember Upmanu Lall, professor at Columbia University, graphically and bluntly making the point that Punjab’s water table was not far from collapse. This has been known for years, and there have been feeble efforts to deal with the problem, but they have been far short of what is needed. My own understanding...

-PRS Legislative Research The key findings of the report entitled: State of Agriculture in India by Tanvi Deshpande (March, 2017) are as follows: * The agriculture sector employs nearly half of the workforce in the country.  However, it contributes to 17.5% of the GDP (at current prices in 2015-16). * Over the past few decades, the manufacturing and services sectors have increasingly contributed to the growth of the economy, while the agriculture sector’s...