-Down to Earth The latest provisional Agriculture Census shows that the average size of farmlands in Goa decreased by 30 per cent in five years India witnessed a jump in the number of operational farmlands between 2010-11 and 2015-16, but the same period also saw the average size of these land holdings and the area they cover take a dip, shows the provisional Agriculture Census released by the Ministry of Agriculture and...

-The Hindu With the ‘feminisation of agriculture’ picking up pace, the challenges women farmers face can no longer be ignored October 15 is observed, respectively, as International Day of Rural Women by the United Nations, and National Women’s Farmer’s Day (Rashtriya Mahila Kisan Diwas) in India. In 2016, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare decided to take the lead in celebrating the event, duly recognising the multidimensional role of women at...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-The Hindu Business Line 2.45 million has been lost to urban sprawl between 2010-11 and 2015-16, says survey New Delhi: In an indication of further deepening of a crisis in the agricutural sector, the average size of operational agricultural holdings in the country has declined to 1.08 hectares (ha) in 2015-16 as compared to 1.15 ha in 2010-11, according to the freshly- released provisional agriculture census data released on Monday. Expectedly, the number...

-The Tribune Agrarian society vs a non-agrarian economy poses a huge political challenge. JUST how many farmers are there in India? This is not merely a statistical question. This is a question of policy and political significance. We have all grown up reading about India as an agrarian economy, with a majority of its population engaged in farming. Does that continue to be the case? Or has the number of farmers declined...