Sivadasan's five-acre farm used to be a solitary patch in Kerala's Palakkad district, with bitter gourd, cucumber, cow peas and lady's finger growing amid a landscape dotted with paddy fields and plantations of rubber and spices.  Just five years later, more than 1.45 lakh farmers in the southern state have joined Sivadasan and started growing vegetables, reflecting a palpable shift sweeping across the Indian countryside.  "Vegetables are always more profitable than paddy,"...

Global climate strategy needs a new storyline. The original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (“Plan A”) was signed almost 20 years ago, but lacked the specifics to drive real action. The Kyoto Protocol aimed to resolve this by curbing emissions from the industrialised world, but the US refused to play its part (Plan B). Just as Kyoto came into effect in 2005, the world was changing, with...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is under pressure from several quarters. One such source of pressure is the rural rich whose concerns were recently voiced by Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, when he raised the bogey of shortage of supply of farm workers because of the employment guarantee scheme. The fact is that the national average for workdays generated under the scheme is less than half of the...

-The Times of India   The government is reaching out to civil society to avoid being caught on the wrong foot while identifying the poor. Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has written to members of the Right to Food Campaign (RFC), addressing their concerns on the manner in which poor households are being identified in the socio-economic and caste census. As part of this effort, a committee headed by Abhijit Sen has been...

At BANCON (annual bankers' conference) 2011 in Chennai, financial institutions explored avenues for greater participation in agriculture and rural development. There are a few areas in need of additional attention and investment. Green Revolution technologies are scale-neutral but not resource-neutral. Inputs are needed for output; therefore market-purchased inputs become important in providing soil and plant healthcare for higher yields. Social scientists point out that small and marginal farmers will be excluded...