The Prime Minister’s Independence Day address to the nation was particularly disappointing this year. The Prime Minister has said, yet again, that "the country needs another Green Revolution". But what’s distressing is that his government has not even formulated a draft strategy for such a revolution in the last five years, let alone launch it. Why? Largely because the agriculture minister has not shown the slightest interest in a "Second...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Farm boy who fed India
Crop scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, an enduring icon for the war on hunger who had helped steer India away from recurrent famines towards self-sufficiency in food, died on Saturday. Borlaug, whose research to improve wheat varieties, initiated in Mexico in 1945, led to the Green Revolution and helped save millions of people from starvation worldwide, died from cancer complications in Texas. He was 95. M.S. Swaminathan,...
More »A home-grown drought
Monsoon this year has failed most of India, causing drought in even well-irrigated and rainfed areas. Ravleen Kaur reports how our food preferences are making us vulnerable to drought Hari Achal Singh has been a farmer for as long as he can remember. And that’s as long as India has been independent. He recalls his childhood when his family depended on rain for irrigation. “We grew arhar (red gram), bajra...
More »The Paper Rations
THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...
More »Drought management for rural livelihood security
Agriculture is not just a food producing machine but the backbone of the livelihood of 60 per cent of Indians. The extensive drought spotlights a situation of mass rural deprivation and a mindset that is insensitive to it. But there are some encouraging signs. What should be done to meet the challenge? There are reports in financial newspapers that the ongoing drought affecting nearly 200 districts in the country may...
More »