-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: Providing income security to farmers and boosting investment in agriculture are the two things that are needed to help Indian farmers in distress, said noted agricultural economist Ashok Gulati on Monday. “While there can’t be two opinions about the farmers’ plight in our country, increasing minimum support price (MSP) cannot be the solution. We may have to bring in science and our understanding to solve their...

-The Hindu Report concedes that farmers couldn’t buy seeds due to cash crunch. Millions of farmers in India were unable to buy seeds and fertilisers for their winter crops because of demonetisation, according to a report submitted by the Union Agriculture Ministry to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance. This official acknowledgement of the impact of demonetisation comes on a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at a rally in Jhabua, Madhya...

-The Hindu We won’t allow anyone to cut our trees, say the women of Balarampur village For three generations now, and spanning 40 years, Chaturi Sahu, 70, has been unfailingly sending one male member from her family to patrol the nearby Jhinkargadi forest to ensure that its trees and shrubs are untouched. Year after year, her father-in-law, husband and son, who are part of the foot soldiers of Balarampur, a nondescript village in...

-TheWire.in In 2015, BJP leader and finance minister Arun Jaitley urged states to pass their own laws related to land acquisition. New Delhi: Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh has written to the President Ramnath Kovind arguing against the dilution of the Central land acquisition law by state laws. The former rural development minister has argued that states have used article 254 (2) ‘indiscriminately’ to frame state land acquisition laws...

-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...