'Erratic rainfall and rising input costs forcing farmers to migrate' “Unable to clear a loan of Rs 2 lakh, my son committed suicide. I had to sell my ancestral house and cattle to repay the loan,” says Lakshmi Devi, 48, of Pathakotha Cheruvu village in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur district. Devi's woes did not end with the repayment of loan. Managing her farm is becoming increasingly difficult, partly because it is expensive,...

Kanak Dixit: We have with us Aruna Roy, from Devdungri village in Rajasthan, who has, among other things, been able to take the Right to Information (RTI) from janasunuwais, or public hearings at the village level, all the way to national legislation that encompasses all of India. It is a movement that is truly global in scale. Aruna, a question that has been troubling me quite a bit in the context...

-The Telegraph Dispur today said the state’s economy was “performing well” when the country’s overall growth rate was projected to be affected by the economic meltdown in Europe. The principal secretary of the state finance department, Himangshu Sekhar Das, said Assam had not borrowed any money from the market in the current fiscal (2011-12) and its tax collection had recorded an increase of 33 per cent, most of which had come from...

Bt cotton has doubled the seed industry and boosted the fortunes of seed firms. But yields still need to improve In the last 10 years, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton and its impact on farmers has perhaps been the most talked about topic in Indian agriculture since the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Not only has farmers’ income from growing Bt cotton risen by almost 67 per cent in the...

In a move that could hurt millions of farmers, the government plans to increase the price of urea and link it to the price of gas in an attempt to reduce its burgeoning fertilizer subsidy bill. Urea is the only fertilizer that has a maximum retail price (MRP) still controlled by the government, which deregulated those of all others in April 2010. Urea sells in the market at Rs.5,310 per tonne,...