-The Hindu Business Line Kochi (Kerala): The two-day conference on ‘Models for Agricultural Development: Experiences of Farmer Producer Companies’, has called for sustained efforts to strengthen, streamline, support and coordinate Farmer Producer Organisations. The conference, jointly organised by the Department of Agricultural Economics, Kerala Agriculture University and Indian Society of Agricultural Economics (ISAE), mooted a national level consortium to help the FPCs realise their goals and lead the efforts to enhance farmers’...

-The Indian Express When it comes to agriculture growth, the NDA government compares poorly with its immediate predecessor. The next government must initiate structural reforms, set realistic targets The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has released the second advanced estimates of national income for 2018-19, along with the quarterly GDP estimates for Quarter 3 (Q3). The overall GDP for Q3 is down to 6.6 per cent and for 2018-19 as a whole,...

-The Hindu With a strength of over 83,000, it procures 3.5 lakh litres of Milk a day Tirupati: Before Shreeja entered her life, middle-aged Gangamma of Palamaner mandal in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district had to be content with the daily drudgery of maintaining her barn and selling the Milk from her cows to a private supplier. And that came with the attendant problems of first realising payments from the buyer, and once...

-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...

-The Indian Express Direct income support for farmers is too late, too little The hopes of farmers for a meaningful package from the Modi government have evaporated after the announcements in the Union budget. The proposed Rs 6,000 annual direct income support to small and marginal farmers is a drop in the ocean. States like Telangana and Odisha have done much better with their Rythu Bandhu and Kalia schemes respectively. After...