The policy is to promote specific high-value segments within agriculture, where corporate houses have major profit interests. A COMMON compliment that Pranab Mukherjee's Union Budget for 2011-12 received from the media was its proclaimed “friendliness” to agriculture and rural areas. It was not just the media; members of India Inc. welcomed the Budget as “focussed” on agriculture. However, a close look at the Budget estimates reveals a different picture. Public...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well. Here in India, one of the 40 countries where SRI is now in use, poor tillers of the land are even helping propagate...

South Asia in general and India in particular have the dubious distinction of standing out for wrong reasons every time a new global poverty report is released. We not only have the largest number of underweight children, a very high maternal mortality rate and the world’s highest number of out of school children but we also top the global malnutrition chart. (See links below for more details)  However the 2011 United...

Pawan Goenka noticed something unusual last year—tractor sales were climbing even though India had its worst monsoon in more than three decades and farm output dropped 2.8% in the three months to December last fiscal. The umbilical cord that tied rainfall patterns and tractor sales seemed to have been ruptured. The president of auto and tractor maker Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd offers an interesting explanation to this puzzle: growing labour shortages...