-IPS News GUNTUR, India: Thirty-seven-year-old Kode Sujatha stands in front of a hut with a palm-thatched roof, surrounded by a group of men shouting angrily and jostling one another for a spot at the front of the crowd. Each of the boatmen, who carry sand mined from a nearby river to the shore every day, wants to be paid before the others. Sujatha stares hard at them, holds up a piece of paper...
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From farmer to businessman -Trilochan Sastry
-The Hindu The fact that food companies prosper but farmers commit suicide shows that profits are in the market, not the farm. It is time to replicate the Amul story many times over In the ongoing debates on the new land acquisition bill, the potential of agribusiness to address agrarian distress has not been explored. There are several domestic agriculture companies, both listed and private, that are doing extremely well amidst an...
More »The slaughter of suicide data -P Sainath
-Frontline Changing the way you count changes the count. THE total number of farmer suicides in the country since 1995 crossed the 3,00,000-mark in 2014. However, the 2014 data are not comparable with 19 earlier years of farm suicide data. This is because of major changes in the methodology of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). With the new parameters, the number of farmer suicides in 2014 falls to 5,650. That is...
More »They sow seeds of success, pave way for others
-The Times of India BELAGAVI: At a time when the state is witnessing a spate of farmers' suicides owing to mounting debts and crop failure, a group of 12 landless farmers in Geddalabavihatti village in Belagavi taluk are writing a success story with hard work and a never-say-die attitude. When they decided to take up farming on about 45 acres of barren land owned by the state government about four years ago,...
More »How loan sharks pull poor farmers into a debt trap -Naheed Ataulla & Anand J
-The Times of India As crops fail, banks don't deliver and the government falters, Mandya's farmers find themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous moneylenders Chenne Gowda has a Rs. 4 lakh albatross around his neck. The 55-year-old sugarcane farmer from Chikka maralli village in Pan davapura taluk, Mandya district, took the loan from private moneylenders but has no idea how he'll repay. His crop, on two acres, is wilting in the field...
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