The government will use satellite technology to assess cotton prospects for the current season and review the export policy in the wake of rising prices of the natural fibre, a senior official said today. "When the Cotton Advisory Board (CAB) meets, it will have an assessment based on the satellite imagery and the Inputs of the Ministry of Agriculture," Textiles Secretary Rita Menon said on the sidelines of a Ficci function...

Even as the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment — dubbed “the Indian Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” — released its first report on the impact of climate change in four regions of the country, it admitted that significant research gaps and lack of extensive databases were hampering Indian climate science. Long-term localised data was not available on vegetation and forest cover, socio-economic trends, farm Inputs, pests and crop diseases,...

Banks have disbursed nearly Rs 90,000 crore credit to farmers in the April-June quarter of this fiscal, the government said on Monday. The government has fixed the credit flow target during 2010-11 fiscal at Rs 3,75,000 crore. "Agriculture credit of Rs 89,687 crore has been disbursed to farmers across the country till June 2010 in the financial year 2010-11," an official statement said. The credit disbursement in 2009-10 was Rs 3,66,919 crore against...

The pattern of land distribution has rendered rural landscape of UP disfavourable for farming. The precursor for this is the fragmentation of cultivable land into a large number of `small landholdings'. The process set under the demographic pressure, has caused marginalisation of a vast majority of farmers and posed a severe challenge to the prospects of rural economy and the growth of agriculture in future. Going by the official figure, UP...

A meticulous study of the agrarian relations in three villages. ONE of our senior sociologists once drew my attention to the distinction between economics and other social sciences. Other social sciences – sociology and anthropology, for instance – he said, pay a great deal of attention to gathering primary data and interpreting them, whereas economics relies on secondary data for its analysis. This is, to a large extent, a fair...