-Down to Earth Instead of burning paddy straw, farmers in Haryana's Panipat district are using it to farm mushrooms. This has eased pollution, too Athick haze would eclipse the sun throughout the day from late October to early November," says Naresh Kumar of Puthar village in Haryana's Panipat district. Sitting beside neatly piled up paddy straw in his small 0.2 hectare field, the 40-year-old farmer is reminiscing about the common practice of...

-Business Standard Currently, the Department of Agriculture runs two crop insurance schemes, one of which is weather-based The Centre is devising an insurance product for farmers that will guarantee to make good their loss in income from natural calamities for at least seven years. For crops with minimum support prices (MSPs), the loss in income will be based on the MSP; for others, it will be calculated based on the average market...

-Down to Earth The situation of India's farmers has only become grimmer in the past decade, according to the latest National Sample Survey Office report The lot of the embattled Indian farmer only keeps on getting worse with the passage of time. In the last 10 years, the voluminous debt of Indian agricultural households has increased almost four-fold whereas their undersized monthly income from cultivation has increased three-fold. Even the number of...

-The Indian Express It's likely that India's crop production this year will be lower compared to 2013-14, given deficient rains both in the southwest (June-September) and northeast (October-December) monsoons impacting kharif as well as rabi plantings. But that by itself needn't be cause for concern. We have seen one-off farm output declines even in 2009-10, 2004-05 and 2002-03, which were also drought years. What should worry us more, instead, is the...

-The Hindu Alleviating poverty in India requires not only cash transfers but also other enabling changes Advocates of unconditional cash transfers claim that they can be both emancipatory and transformative. They argue that people are quite capable of making rational decisions. And that this kind of basic income support can improve their lives. I have no quarrel with the claim that we must trust the poor. Such suspicion is part of an elite...