-The Hindu How India can shift its agriculture from a high-yield ideal to a high-value one When the news broke that PepsiCo was suing small farmers in India for growing a potato variety that is used in its Lay’s chips, popular sympathies immediately went, of course, to the farmers. National and international pressure swiftly mounted, and in short order a humbled PepsiCo backtracked, announcing its withdrawal of the lawsuit. There was global...
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More Than a Year After Crop Failure, Maharashtra Farmers Still Wait for Insurance Payout -Poorvi Kulkarni
-TheWire.in For many farmers, the compensation they received is substantially less than the premium they paid. Parbhani (Maharashtra): “If even one rupee owed to one farmer is not paid, then the government will pay that money and recover it from the (insurance) company,” said Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis while addressing an rally ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He was referring to the Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme (Pradhan Mantri...
More »MGNREGA: Drought-hit India abandoned 18 lakh water works in just one year -Richard Mahapatra & Raju Sajwan
-Down to Earth India's villages miss a golden chance to become drought-proof as more MGNREGA projects grind to a halt Almost half of India is currently under drought; for many districts this is the second-consecutive drought. Given this, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) should have been the key scheme to not only mitigate impacts of drought but also employ people in distress for earning. But an analysis of...
More »Farm ponds that dot parched Marathwada may deplete groundwater in the long run -Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar
-The Times of India AURANGABAD: A patchwork of brown fields is visible from the air as you fly into this drought-hit region in rural Maharashtra. But amid the dry land is a growing mosaic of blue and brown squares and rectangles. These are farm ponds: Large earthen structures that have spread across rural Maharashtra in the past five years, thanks to a raft of central and state subsidies. The ponds were conceived...
More »Saurashtra woes: Policy change on check dams leads to water deficit -Shagun Kapil
-Down to Earth In the 1990s, non-profits and farmers themselves built check dams; today, the government does it, without proper research or site selection Fifty-four-year old Dineshbhai Babariya has just harvested a 20 quintal cotton crop, his second harvest in the last one year in his four bigha (1.6 acre) farm in the Jasapar village of Gujarat’s Saurashtra region. August 2018 was the last time the village in Rajkot district received around 228...
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