-The Hindu India’s richest woman, former CM O.P. Chautala among beneficiaries A businesswoman figuring on the Forbes list of top ten richest Indians and a former Chief Minister currently in jail after being convicted in Junior Basic Trained teachers’ recruitment scam and the son of a former Chief Minister are among the 262 beneficiaries of the Haryana Government’s pension scheme for former MLAs with an annual expenditure of Rs. 22.93 crore, an...
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Mechanical solutions -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express Forcing machinery on farmers without giving a thought to the economics of their utilisation can prove counter-productive. There are three main impediments to farm mechanisation in India. The first is cost, which, for a standard 50-horsepower tractor, today averages around Rs 6.5-6.8 lakh. But a tractor is just a source of power and traction, and only as good as the farm implements it can pull. The most basic tractor-drawn tiller/cultivator...
More »Economic logic of setting paddy fields on fire -Sayantan Bera and Shrishti Choudhary
-Livemint.com Since the paddy straw cannot be used as animal feed, farmers set fire to it to get the field ready for the next crop of wheat New Delhi: On a balmy evening last week, Sandeep Singhroha, a farmer from Haryana’s Karnal district, set fire to a pile of paddy stubble with a matchstick and then dragged the pile across his field with a garden fork. Soon, the two-acre plot was up...
More »Fines fail to deter stubble burning -Jacob Koshy
-The Hindu Farm equipment which can root out this practice not universally accessible despite govt. subsidy Patiala: Between September 27 and October 14, the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB) imposed Rs. 8,92,500 as fines — or “environmental compensation cess” as it is officially called — on farmers burning paddy stubble. However, they collected only Rs. 3,05,000, according to figures from the organisation. “The fines are collected over time … frequently the farmers don’t...
More »The land challenge underlying India's farm crisis -Vishnu Padmanabhan
-Livemint.com With shrinking farm sizes and lack of accurate land records, farmers find it difficult to generate enough income to provide for their households From farm subsidies to farm loan waivers, the Indian government spends crores on farmer welfare, but these efforts will be inadequate unless they can tackle an increasingly daunting barrier: lack of land. The provisional figures from the latest agriculture census reveals how land—the most critical input for agriculture—is...
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