-Down to Earth17 clusters have been chosen in 8 states to roll out the pilot of Operation Green, a Central scheme aimed to contain annual price distress of tomatoes, onion and potatoes Nine months after announcing ?Operation Green? to provide the rightful price to farmer producers, the Union government has prepared guidelines to implement the operation. The scheme was devised to contain the annual price distress of tomatoes, onion and...

-The Hindu With the ‘feminisation of agriculture’ picking up pace, the challenges women farmers face can no longer be ignored October 15 is observed, respectively, as International Day of Rural Women by the United Nations, and National Women’s Farmer’s Day (Rashtriya Mahila Kisan Diwas) in India. In 2016, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare decided to take the lead in celebrating the event, duly recognising the multidimensional role of women at...

-The Telegraph March sought equality for farm workers New Delhi: A band of bold women is outing alleged predators in newsrooms in the country while another group of women is hitting the streets to bar their gender from the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. In the middle of the twin turmoil and away from the limelight, as many as 25,000 people from the election-bound heartland had last week set out on a long march...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre is mulling bringing organic produce under the minimum support price (MSP) regime to promote pesticide-free farming in the country. At present, there is no support price for organic produce, except in Sikkim which approved it in May for horticultural items. The agriculture ministry recently discussed offering 20% higher MSP for organic farm produce over traditional (non-organic) produce and procuring a minimum 10% of organic...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...