-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...
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Corridors of power: The Great Indian monsoon circus -Santosh Tiwari
-The Financial Express The NITI Aayog must firm up a concrete plan involving the states to deal with monsoon deficiency to avoid all-round confusion. This is an old and oft-repeated story in the media, but worth mentioning here for the readers who have missed it. It goes like this. During the period of erstwhile Planning Commission, one of the officials in-charge of projecting agricultural growth found out an innovative way to do...
More »India's farm output falls for the first time in 5 years amid fears of drought
-DNA Govt gears up to ring-fence farmers, prices from poor rains India's farm sector shrank for the first time in five years in the year ended March 31, Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said on Wednesday, a day after the government forecast a likely drought this year that could hit output again. The Met office cut this year's monsoon forecast on an El Nino weather pattern that has raised fears of...
More »Irrigation scheme's targets unlikely to be met -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-Business Standard Modi's flagship programme faces an uphill task of total irrigation One of the major pre-poll promises of the Narendra Modi government has been his idea of 'per drop more crop', which, in other words, means an extensive network of canals and irrigation facilities for farming. Pradhan Mantri Sinchaee Yojana, initially under the ministry of water resources, got transferred to the department of agriculture and its nomenclature was changed to the Pradhan...
More »Environment: Ecological suicide -Ashish Kothari
-The Hindu The growth-at-all-cost mantra has left a vast majority of people impoverished. If the first year of the BJP government is any indication, its five-year stint may turn out to be the worst period for India’s environment and ecosystem-dependent people since the 1980s. This is saying a lot, given that none of the previous governments has been particularly sensitive to issues of fresh air and water, productive soil, healthy forests and grasslands....
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