The new era of price rise can be turned into a profitable proposition for the farmer. The decade that passed can safely be called agrarian. For good or bad reasons, the world spent the decade talking about agriculture. Food grain price rise was the talking point across the continents. To note a landmark, the decade ended an era of cheap food. After the food crisis in 1974 there was a continuous...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Bitter Harvest by Lyla Bavadam
A small farmer in Maharashtra, whose high-yielding rice variety is popular in five States, is denied the benefits of his research. TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, Dadaji Khobragade of Nanded Fakir village in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra noticed yellow seeds in three spikes of a paddy stalk in his field. Intrigued by the freak Harvest, he preserved the grains. He subsequently planted them in a six-foot square plot, which he covered with thorny...
More »Our cotton, their onions
India's reported willingness to relax its ceiling on cotton exports to accommodate the Pakistani demand for the commodity if Pakistan will permit the overland export of onions is a welcome development. The floods in Pakistan affected some portion of its cotton crop, and the country is now short of the commodity for its domestic textile and yarn industry, the mainstay of its fragile economy; heavy and unseasonal rains have caused...
More »Should the rural job guarantee scheme be linked to minimum wages?
The question raises fundamental issues about the MGNREGA’s centralised template and poor delivery mechanism, but it is important to provide a legal basis to its wage structure to protect it against inflation. We need to remember that the way the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was originally conceived, wages were never meant to be equal to the minimum wages; they should have been lower. This is because the...
More »Crops hit by frost, 5 farmers end lives by Suchandana Gupta
Their crops destroyed by frost between January 5 and 9, five farmers in Madhya Pradesh committed suicide while three are battling for their lives after consuming pesticide. The weather destroyed their standing crops of wheat, soyabean, gram, peas, opium and oranges in just five days. Their crops gone, farmers in the state, like their counterparts in Andhra Pradesh, also faced the prospect of defaulting on repayment of loan from banks...
More »