HAS GREEN REVOLUTION FAILED INDIA'S POOR? Green Revolution Vs Rain-fed Farming OVERVIEW: Of late India’s fabled Green Revolution has come under severe attack. Many development thinkers believe that it has unfairly skewed India’s agriculture policy in favour of the farmers whose land is already or potentially covered under irrigation. The basic criticism is that the Green Revolution has been largely irrelevant for India’s 60 per cent cultivable land which is un-irrigated. These...

Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus. Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from...

“THE world’s attention is back on your cause.” That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists gathered recently to honour the late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. The tycoon-turned-philanthropist was right. This week, the world—in the guise of 60-odd heads of state including the pope—held the first United Nations food summit since 2002. As the world’s attention turns from the receding financial crisis, it is switching to one...

AMIT KUMAR must be one of the few bankers in the world turning away depositors. The manager of a village bank in the Indian state of Rajasthan, he was reluctant to take a cheque for 1m rupees ($21,200) from the elected head of the village, or sarpanch. The cheque was meant to pay hundreds of villagers for their work under India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which guarantees 100...

Five farmers committed suicide from the Vidarbha region of Maharastra within the last two days of the month of August, 2009. The farmers who committed suicides belonged to the districts for which special relief package was being announced recently. According to a press note circulated by the Vidarbha People’s Movement Committee, within the last 48 hours of August, farmers were forced to commit suicide as they faced crop failures owing...