-The Hindu Business Line Noted Gandhian economist Dr Sudarshan Iyengar surveys the distressed agricultural landscape, pinpoints its weaknesses, and prescribes solutions with their roots in Gandhian agronomics. Edited excerpts from an interview to BusinessLine: * Given the agrarian crisis in India today, how relevant are Gandhi's economic principles based on the village economy, and equitable distribution of resources? They are relevant in the context of Gandhi's view of gram swaraj (village self-rule), which...
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Lack of milling facility forces paddy-surplus Tripura to spend crores on rice imports -Debraj Deb
-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...
More »Farm subsidy to loan waivers: A race to compensate farmers for their losses -Ashok Gulati
-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...
More »Farmers' collectives: Taking Farmer Producer Organisations beyond 'romance' to 'relationships' -PVS Suryakumar
-The Indian Express Development professionals and policymakers have tried many a scheme to address these issues. One idea that has found resonance in recent times is Farmer Producer Organisations or FPOs. It is well-known that Indian farming is predominantly subsistence-oriented. Over 86% of our farmers operate individual holdings below two hectares, while cultivating 47% of the country’s total cultivated area. The production and productivity of these farms are generally low, and...
More »Policy must tackle not just dissatisfaction of large farmers, but distress of most vulnerable -Bina Agarwal
-The Indian Express To address farmers' woes, we need a multi-pronged strategy of income support, government investment, and institutional innovations, and not a one-size-fits-all approach. The two main policy interventions repeatedly discussed in recent months to tackle farmer distress — loan waivers and minimum support prices (MSP) — treat all farmers (large/small, male/female) alike. But farmers are heterogeneous. They differ especially by income, land owned and gender. And farmer dissatisfaction is...
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