-The Indian Express To solve India’s deep agrarian crisis, more public investment and government support are needed, not the new farm laws The farmers’ movement invites us to revisit the trajectory of India’s agriculture so as to understand its real problems. Beginning in the mid-1960s, India and, especially, Punjab experienced a massive productivity boom as a result of widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies. This transition was driven by public investment in...

-The Indian Express Governments can learn much on how to construct a social welfare system for farmers from Odisha's KALIA scheme for DIS. The recent farmer agitation has brought the issue of farmer distress front and centre in the public consciousness. The time seems ripe to find new solutions to the structural challenges facing farmers. One promising step is the shift from non-targeted agriculture subsidies towards direct income support (DIS). A key...

-IndiaSpend.com National datasets differ on women's land rights because they use different criteria in their calculations. Bhubaneswar: There are wide variations in national datasets on women's land ownership in India depending on which agency made the estimate, frustrating efforts to design and implement gender-balanced policies, our analysis shows. National datasets differ on women's land rights (WLR) because they use different criteria in their calculations. Some estimates include only agricultural land, others include homestead...

-The Indian Express It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators...

-The Hindu The gender gap in the agriculture sector will only widen more with the current farm laws Eminent agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan once said, “Some historians believe that it was women who first domesticated crop plants and thereby initiated the art and science of farming. While men went out hunting in search of food, women started gathering seeds from the native flora and began cultivating those of interest from the point...