-The Indian Express Govt plans to change existing law to ensure availability of quality seeds to farmers. How will the proposed Bill to replace The Seeds Act, 1966 meet its objective of ‘regulating quality of seeds for sale, import, export’? The existing 1966 law already provides for regulation of the quality of seeds. What does the new Bill seek to change? The current Act only covers “notified kinds or varieties of seeds”. Thus,...
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Looking up: The farm hope -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express The ongoing price recovery in major crops is in danger of being stymied by knee-jerk government response. A lot of analyst commentary on the latest quarterly GDP numbers for India has focused on the low growth in “nominal” terms: Gross value added (GVA) at current prices grew by just 6.3% year-on-year in July-September and 7.1% for April-September. If this first-half trend holds for the rest of 2019-20, it would...
More »India's fertiliser drain: Urea of darkness -Sarthak Ray
-Financial Express A study by ICRIER researchers Ashok Gulati and Pritha Banerjee shows how problematic the fertiliser policy is—for farmers, industry, the environment and the government. India’s experience with fertilisers, in the later part of the Green Revolution, prompted it to adopt a policy of subsidising fertilisers. In 1977, the country had a total NPK (nitrogenous, phosphatic and potassic) fertiliser consumption of 4.3 million metric tonnes (mmt) and per hectare usage...
More »NCRB silence on farmer suicides: Reason given by govt fails against earlier data -Deeptiman Tiwary
-The Indian Express The latest NCRB report does not enlist reasons for farmer suicides. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs told Parliament last week that the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) had done away with diversified data on farmer suicides in its latest report as many states reported the figure to be “nil”, and hence recording reasons for the suicides was “untenable”. However, an analysis of previous NCRB data shows that states...
More »Punjab groundwater crisis: What it will take to move from paddy to maize -Anju Agnihotri Chaba
-The Indian Express At current rates of depletion, Punjab’s entire subsurface water resource could be exhausted in a little over two decades. Jalandhar: As the discussion around Punjab’s massive groundwater crisis becomes more urgent, there is an increasingly stronger accent on diversification of crops, and a move away from water-guzzling paddy. At a meeting over the weekend, Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, decided to strengthen maize — the most important alternative to...
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