-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...

-The Hindu China was the largest importer of the grain in 2015-16. New Delhi: China may soon grant market access to India's non-basmati rice exports, acceding to a long-pending request from New Delhi. The Centre had repeatedly taken up the issue of the country’s ballooning goods trade deficit with China bilaterally. India had demanded market access for products including non-basmati rice, pharmaceuticals and several fruits & vegetables among others. India’s goods trade deficit with...

-The Hindu Business Line Good rain, increased acreage and hike in minimum support prices likely to cool prices The Modi government has been struggling over the last two years to contain the unprecedented rise in the prices of pulses, the second-most important food item after cereals. In the interim, prices of tur have more than doubled, and near-doubled in the case of urad and chana. WPI prices for pulses increased 35.76 per...

-The Indian Express The GI tag is used to identify various kinds of goods including Darjeeling tea, Kanchipuram silk saree and Kolhapuri chappal. When Krishnakumar Tomar, one of the first to grow basmati in this fertile belt, harvested his crop 14 years back, he had no idea where to sell it. With no local takers for the aromatic paddy, the 40-year-old from Badi, which falls in Raisen district, was told he could...