-The Hindu Business Line A sustainable collectivisation of agri produce and marketing, through Farmer Producer Organisations, will help the highly fragmented agriculture sector realise its full revenue potential. It is widely known that India’s agriculture sector has a challenge of lack of scale. Around 80 per cent of our farmers are small and marginal, with less than two hectares of land. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) have been posed for years as the...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-GaonConnection.com The Indian government is considering ‘mandatory’ food fortification in the country. Several health experts have written to FSSAI calling the decision ‘a blanket approach’ to meet the complexity of malnutrition in the country. Details here. At least 170 people and organisations, including medical experts and nutritionists, have today, on August 2, written a letter to Ashok Kumar Mishra, the assistant director of Food Fortification Resource Centre, department that regulates food under...

-Down to Earth State-led control of population might be criticised, but it will help us in the long run to stabilise the population growth in Uttar Pradesh Population is a hard reality. A state like Uttar Pradesh, which consists of 200 million people, needs to respond to this hard reality. That is why the Uttar Pradesh government led by Adityanath has proposed the UP population control bill 2021 recently. Governance in this drastically...

-Down to Earth The focus must be on safeguarding women and girls’ reproductive health. Smaller families can be achieved by ensuring gender equality, empowering women The law proposed by the Uttar Pradesh Law Commission on July 7, 2021 on two-child policy compels couples to LIMit their families through a series of incentives and disincentives. There is no evidence, however, that coercive policies can truly reduce fertility. Two-child policies are known to disproportionately impact...