Degraded soils, depleting groundwater, and chemical pesticides are playing havoc, placing agriculture in terrible distress. I haven’t forgotten that night. Sitting with a group of farmers in a village in Ludhiana district in Punjab, at the height of the Green Revolution, a farmer showed me a bag of fertiliser that he brought from the market. “Why are you showing me this bag”, I asked. “Wait”, he said, and began to open the...
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Give food some thought by Surinder Sud
Reforms in the supply-chain system can help India tackle the demand-supply mismatch in essential food items Food inflation may have dropped to single digit but since that fall is set against last year’s elevated double-digit base, it continues to hurt the poor — 65 per cent of their disposable income goes towards food. The government often defends its failure to tame inflation by arguing that it has no magic wand to...
More »The coming crisis for rain-dependent India by M Rajshekhar
It's that time of the year when Kishore Lal Singh's eyes almost involuntarily scan the skies. The monsoons are coming. In the months ahead, for this Bhil farmer growing cotton, maize and soya south of the Malwa plateau in Madhya Pradesh, life will again hang on a knife's edge. If it rains well, his two bighas (about four basketball courts) of cotton will yield 1,000 kg. If not, he will...
More »With the grain by Yoginder K Alagh
India has large wheat stocks already yet policy dictates they increase. In states like Punjab, Haryana, UP and Gujarat prices have fallen and are below the minimum support prices. This is a policy-induced outcome. A safe game in grains is fine, given the global politics of grain trade and the great ability of Indian politics to subsidise the wrong man in the vote bank — but how safe is safe? The...
More »67.66 lakh metric tn of wheat arrives in Haryana
-The Business Standard Over 6.76 million metric tonne of wheat has arrived in various grain markets of Haryana so far this season as against total arrivals of 6.36 million metric tonne last season. Record wheat arrival of 6.92 million metric tonne was recorded in the state in the year 2009-10, a spokesman of the state's Food and Supplies Department said here today. He said that Sirsa district was leading in...
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