-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...

-The Indian Express Getting the right remuneration is the most critical issue facing farmers. Government must provide policy, institutional framework for procurement. The farmer and his income is an important theme of discussion these days. A lot is being written on ways to increasing, and doubling, the farmers’ incomes by the year 2022. Viewed arithmetically, the income of a farmer is a function of three things — the cost of cultivation, production...

-Mumbai Mirror The Modi government says it will double farmers’ real earnings by 2022, but so far, it has only delivered committees and reports. In early 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double farmers’ income by 2022, and the government subsequently set up an inter-ministerial committee led by Ashok Dalwai, additional secretary in the agriculture ministry, to prepare a roadmap. About two weeks ago, the committee submitted its fourteenth and final...