-Scroll.in The community feels the recent evictions are about communal politics, not land. Assamese Muslims agree. Manikajan Bibi is scared of losing her home. It is one windowless room built with tin sheets held together by wooden beams. In nervous anticipation, she has bundled this season’s harvest of rice into two sacks, her sarees in a fraying mud brown rexine bag. A rusty trunk holds everything else – mostly a bunch of...

The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...

-Down to Earth  The past three decades have seen stagnation in acreage, production and productivity of pulses across the country due to a bevy of reasons that include availability of more profitable crops The primary reason behind India’s domestic shortage in pulses is stagnation of production over the past five decades. Overcoming the Pulses Crisis, a 2010 report by the Confederation of Indian Industry, states the production of pulses grew only by...

-Hindustan Times Supporters of the three farm laws have been arguing that the new regime will help farmers receive better prices by selling products in the open market rather than the APMCs. SAS data does not support such a claim That Indian Agriculture has been distress-ridden is an accepted fact in post-reform India. However, this is often discussed more in terms of farmers’ suicides, especially during the last decade, or abysmally low...

-Down to Earth Sri Lanka has found itself in an economic crisis in pursuit of producing 100% organic food   ‘Lankan food crisis shows perils of organic farming’. This was the headline of a column by Indian economist Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar column published in a national daily recently. Aiyar’s article analysed the Sri Lankan food crisis, which has been triggered by the President’s recent decision to shift from chemical to organic farming. While the...