-ThePrint.in Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis says his govt has tried to handle the drought situation, but any farmer suicide remains a matter of concern. Mumbai: Farmer suicides in Maharashtra have nearly doubled in the four years of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, despite a surge in the overall expenditure on the agriculture sector. Data from the state’s relief and rehabilitation department shows that 11,225 farmer suicides were recorded between January 2015 and...

-The Hindu Business Line Expectation of Loan Waiver causes farmers to stop payment against existing loans. They don’t buy insurance for the next season The Centre launched the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) in January 2016. While crop insurance programmes in Indiahave been in place for more than four decades, interest among farmers about insuring their crops has been low, which is reflected in the modest coverage level. According to latest data...

-Mumbai Mirror The Maharashtra government’s claims about the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Shetkari Sanman Yojana (CSMSSY), a farmers’ Loan Waiver scheme, have fallen flat as only around half the money – Rs 16,498 crore – has been disbursed to 39.78 lakh farmers out of the state’s 80 lakh farmers. In June 2017, the Devendra Fadnavis government had announced Rs 34,000 crore for 80 lakh farmers. However, the latest data released by the...

-Livemint.com With shrinking farm sizes and lack of accurate land records, farmers find it difficult to generate enough income to provide for their households From farm subsidies to farm Loan Waivers, the Indian government spends crores on farmer welfare, but these efforts will be inadequate unless they can tackle an increasingly daunting barrier: lack of land. The provisional figures from the latest agriculture census reveals how land—the most critical input for agriculture—is...

-Livemint.com Loan Waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...