-The Indian Express While procurement has become popular among farmers, insufficient collection is forcing the government to shell out hundreds of crores every year for rice imports while they have got all the rice right at home. Tripura’s BJP-led state government is procuring 10,000 MT paddy from farmers at Minimum Support Price (MSP) starting Monday, even as the Centre’s Food Corporation of India (FCI), which procured paddy for the first time...

-Economic and Political Weekly The changes in Odisha’s agriculture made paddy production a losing proposition, especially for the small farmers who leased in land. Substantial decline in farm income caused by exploitative land lease arrangements, denial of access to a regulated market, crop failures, increased cost of cultivation, and indebtedness pushed these farmers into severe economic hardship and an inhospitable social environment, which ultimately led to their suicides. Please click here to read more....

-The Hindu Title holding in-laws refuse to share benefits like Rythu Bandhu Hyderabad: Lakshmi is a woman farmer with a small holding in Gadsingapur village of Pargi mandal in Vikarabad district. She is left with two children, both girls, after her husband committed suicide a few years ago unable to bear the burden of mounting debts. She grew paddy and groundnut in her one acre land for some time, but later has been...

-Outlook   Introduced to Nutrition Sensitive Integrated Farming System (NSIFS), or Poshan Kheti, by JEEViKA, Sushma Devi found that food produced in the family farm and kitchen garden was the perfect solution to feed her family sufficiently. Sushma Devi, a small farmer in Purnea, Bihar, was not able to provide diverse foods to her family of six members - comprising her husband, in-laws and children. Each of them has different dietary...

-The Hindu Raipur: Selling his paddy crop was a pleasantly different experience this year for Yogesh Nareti, a farmer with 17 acres of land in Makadi village in Chhattisgarh’s Kanker district, which goes to the polls this week. “During the BJP reign, selling the produce at Large-sized Agricultural Multipurpose Cooperative Societies (LAMPS) was tedious. The entire process used to take two months,” he recalls. “Now, besides offering a lucrative MSP [minimum support...