In his fields, Badhia Naval Singh , a farmer tilling 8 bighas of land in the Bagli tehsil in Madhya Pradesh, has been seeing something strange for a while now. Earlier, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms . "Ab woh dikhna bandh ho gaye hain (they don't show up any longer)," says the 45-yearold . Also, he says, when he ploughed earlier, the soil...

India registered a good 8.5 percent GDP growth in 2010-11 staving off the global impact of recession mainly due to the major recovery in the agriculture sector. The recorded foodgrain production in 2010-11 was the outcome of the initiatives of the state governments, the union government has now acknowledged. It was an innovation's galore to say the least if one takes into consideration the efforts of the 10 states that went...

Despite the much-hyped rural consumption boom and all the social sector programmes of the government, the income inequality between the rural and urban consumer widened to 91% in the first five years of the United Progressive Alliance coming to power in 2004. According to the 66th round of the household consumption expenditure survey released by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) on Friday, the per capita expenditure level of the urban...

Andhra farmers shun growing paddy this kharif in absence of buyers, storage space Achanta, a small village in Andhra Pradesh, hit the headlines in 1967 with a record rice yield in the kharif or monsoon crop season. It was the time of the Green Revolution. N Subba Rao, a farmer from the village, harvested three tonnes of paddy from just one kilogramme of seeds. Other farmers followed suit and the village...

When he drank poison on January 11, farmer Hargovind Harne’s run-down hut was bursting with freshly harvested paddy. Yet he was neck-deep in debt. Even the bottle of pesticide that he used to take his own life had been bought on credit, as the bill shows. His large stock of grain wasn’t the only puzzle in the 47-year-old’s suicide. Vidarbha is infamous for continuing suicides by cotton farmers but Harne grew food,...