With seven months of drought each year, Indian farmers are rarely far from disaster. Could the answer be as simple as a piece of plastic tubing? In Maharashtra, western India, the temperature is soaring into the forties. The monsoon is over and there are months of relentless baking sunshine ahead. The fertile lands are turning into kilometre after kilometre of scorched brown earth. Farming has become almost impossibly difficult. Solitary figures...

Finally, they have bitten the bullet on fertiliser subsidy. For the past three years, the Union government has agonised on the issue of mounting expenditure on this account and has not had the courage to cut the subsidy. While Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced his intent to introduce a nutrient-based subsidy (NBS) in his last Budget Speech, he has finally shown courage to do so on the eve of this...

The new nutrient based subsidy (NBS) regime cleared by the Union Cabinet on Thursday is likely to slash the governments subsidy bill and boost fertilizer production. But one of the major stated aims of the policy that of promoting a more balanced use of fertilizers by farmers may not be actualized unless other measures are implemented in tandem. That seems to be the view of many agriculture experts and economists,...

In Danta village, 15km from Bhilwara city, 30-odd women start filing in at 8.30 am daily to resume work on building a concrete water reservoir. The women are among the 2,000 people in the village who have got work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) since the scheme, promising 100 days of work a year to one adult member of every rural family, was launched two years ago...

In a bold move that will not just prune the humongous fertiliser subsidy bill but also change the face of agriculture, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aided by several Cabinet colleagues, today brought in a nutrient-based subsidy (NBS) regime. This will incentivise companies to innovate beyond a handful of products sold in the market presently and offer farmers choice based on soil needs. This is expected to trim the subsidy bill...