-The Hindu Move after meeting with manufacturers A day after fertilizer producers announced a sharp 46% to 58.33% hike in prices citing higher raw material costs, the Central Government intervened on Friday to ensure a rollback even though fertilizer prices are no longer regulated. Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilizers Mansukh Mandaviya said prices would remain unchanged for now, after a ‘high-level’ meeting was held with the major fertilizer companies. Opposition parties had...

-Countercurrents.org More than half of rural households in India are landless, or almost so. This deprives them of the most obvious asset needed for sustainable livelihoods and food security in villages–farmland. After  agriculture the next most important source of rural livelihood in India is dairy farming but here too the household with farmland has free access to crop residues which is increasingly not available to landless households who  have to incur extra...

-CaravanMagazine.in In the cover story of The Caravan’s March 2021 issue, “Mandi, Market and Modi,” Hartosh Singh Bal reported about the Indian Government’s efforts to remake India’s agricultural economy for large private players. In the following excerpt from the story, Bal traces the infrastructure that the Adani group have already built to store, transport and market agricultural produce. There has been considerable conversation around what the entry of private buyers in procurement...

-The Hindu Rabi marketing season kicks off in Punjab Saturday but, until Thursday, the state and central Governments had been locked in a tussle over the mode of payment to farmers. Chandigarh/New Delhi: A “threat”, some fireworks, and a concession — it was after a super-charged two-hour meeting between its ministers and Union Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Minister Piyush Goyal Thursday that Punjab finally agreed to introduce direct benefit transfer...

-The Indian Express Potato is cultivated on almost four lakh acres of land in West Bengal between December and March, with about 10 lakh farmers growing the crop. Hooghly: With West Bengal in the midst of a polarising election season, farmers in the state’s potato belt of Hooghly and parts of Purba Bardhaman say their cries for help are getting drowned out in the din of a high-decibel poll campaign. Potato is cultivated...